The doctoral position is embedded in the BCDSS-funded collaborative research group with IDOS, Power, Knowledge and Servitude at Sea (POESIS). POESIS turns to maritime and littoral worlds to trace the asymmetric dependencies that land-centred accounts often obscure, asking how power takes shape through epistemic hierarchies, labour regimes, and more-than-human relations, and how these formations are navigated and contested in everyday life.
Based in Work Package 3: “Submerged Dependencies,” this PhD project explores environments below the waterline as sites where biodiversity conservation, cultural heritage management, and security regimes converge. It invites proposals that examine how heritage governance, conservation, and security reshape access, custodianship, and the very definition of biocultural heritage under particular conditions. Projects may focus on marine protected areas, UNESCO biosphere reserves, and other submerged zones, particularly where these intersect with militarised spaces and extractive frontiers.
Applications from all geographical regions are welcome. We encourage historically grounded, methodologically diverse projects combining ethnographic practices with multimodal approaches such as participatory (counter)mapping, art-based collaboration, archival research, oral history, and policy analysis. Proposals that connect contemporary struggles over security and marine governance to longer histories of empire and developmentalism, while engaging debates on restitution, climate reparations, biodiversity, and/or custodianship, are especially welcome.
We invite candidates who aspire to combine the acquisition of professional experience with the preparation of a PhD dissertation in the context of the BCDSS-IDOS joint partnership programme. In its semi-structured PhD programme, IDOS combines a focus on research with policy advice and offers a blend of: a) group mentoring and training activities, b) self-organized peer mentoring among the PhD group, and c) one-on-one mentoring with the PhD supervisors and mentors. The programme ensures excellent working conditions for the successful and timely completion of the PhD studies, as well as an effective combination of project and dissertation work. This four-year doctoral position includes integration into the BCDSS Doctoral Programme comprising regular research workshops with internationally recognised scholars, participation in international conferences, support for fieldwork and research stays, academic coursework, additional skills training, and close supervision throughout the dissertation period.
The PhD will be awarded by the University of Bonn’s Department of Sociology and is open to interdisciplinary work spanning the critical humanities and social sciences. The doctoral project will be co-supervised by Dr. Rapti Siriwardane-de Zoysa and Prof. Dr. Anna-Katharina Hornidge and can be pursued either as a monograph or as a cumulative dissertation based on three or more peer-reviewed journal articles.
If you have obtained a foreign university degree, please attach the database excerpt from Anabin to your application documents as proof of recognition of the degree by the Central Office for Foreign Education (ZAB) of the Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs (KMK).
Underwater Archaeology and Maritime History jobs 