A PhD position (4 years, full time): just climate resilience & social learning with film
at “Critical Sustainability Studies” Unit & mLAB
100 %
Institute of Geography, University of Bern
Starting date: Sept. 1st, 2025
You will be part of the transdisciplinary EU-funded Horizon project “JustREACH: Just Climate Resilience through Enhanced Adaptation and Capacity Harnessing”. The project aims to enhance resilience by empowering local actors to achieve equitable climate adaptation outcomes. We will work in five pilot regions in urban, industrial,
and rural settings in Germany, France, Greece, the UK and Croatia. Facing resource constraints, the authorities often struggle to balance overlapping objectives and to co-create an understanding of just resilience. The research project involves researchers, citizens with a cause, policymakers, businesses, and civic organizations to co-create tools and ways of working together to implement climate adaptation plans for well-being and societal transformation. Social learning videos with authentic storytelling will be co-created at all pilot sites to share their transformative knowledge about adaptation processes.
- Conduct transdisciplinary PhD research in Geography with a methodological focus on understanding and fostering social learning processes across the pilot sites,
- Learning the Social Learning Video method, exploring the potential, critically reflecting and developing the method further,
- Conduct extensive multi-sited fieldwork with the camera in a collaborative manner (five pilot sites),
- Contributing to JustREACH workshops, conferences, reading groups, colloquia and mLab events,
- Outputs of your PhD are social learning videos and published results in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
- Excellent completed master's degree in sustainability and transformation research or related fields such as human geography, global, urban and mobility studies, human ecology, visual anthropology, sociology,
- Proven experience in working with film (camera, editing) and qualitative methods,
- High interest and, preferably, already experience in transdisciplinary research, co-creation & integrating different perspectives,
- Strong commitment to extensive field research with a camera at different places in Europe and critical reflection of multi-sited research,
- Excellent written and spoken English. German, French, Croatian, and Greek are strong additional assets.
- High level of self-organisation for field sites and eco-friendly modes of travelling,
- Willingness to move to Switzerland to become part of our team.
JustREACH connects project partners across Europe (Lead: TU Delft). You will be based at the Critical Sustainability Studies research unit and the mLAB, Institute of Geography, University of Bern.
Your PhD supervisors are Prof. Dr. Susan Thieme and Dr. Patricia Fry.
The project starts mid-September 2025, with a 2-day kick-off meeting in Delft (NL), which you must join.
committed to just futures,
- Supportive supervision and mentoring,
- A unique opportunity to collaborate with inter- and transdisciplinary project partners across Europe,
- Fully funded PhD position for 4 years (according to University of Bern salary standards) with budget for fieldwork and conferences,
- Possibility to participate in the International Graduate School North-South (https://www.igs-northsouth. ch/).
Online information on the EU project is still limited. Please email Susan Thieme and Patricia Fry (susan.thieme@unibe.ch or contact@patriciafry.ch) for further information.
Application deadline: 15. April 2025
Interviews will be held May 6th and 7th, 2025, at the Institute of Geography, University of Bern.
