We are looking for a candidate with:
- An excellent Master’s degree in Architecture and Urban Planning (or a related discipline) with a demonstrable research interest in transnational urbanism, home-making in displacement, displacement urbanism. Affinity with migration studies and gender studies is an added value;
- A strong commitment to working within an interdisciplinary team;
- Ability to formulate sharp research questions, develop studies and deliver valuable results;
- A high level of proficiency in English and French, both spoken and written. Knowledge of local languages of Eastern DRCongo is highly welcomed;
- Regional knowledge of Eastern DRCongo and/or the Congolese diaspora in Belgium is recommended;
- Key technical skills for developing maps, including experience with platforms such as ArcGIS or QGIS, and software like AutoCAD and Adobe Suite;
- Web development knowledge (such as HTML 5 or Java) for front-end integration and data visualization is an added value.
All candidates are strongly encouraged to submit their Master’s thesis and/or any other relevant English writing sample. Short-listed candidates will be asked to fulfil concise assignments to test their language proficiency and the technical competencies listed above.
This PhD position forms part of a new interdisciplinary FWO research project at KU Leuven and Ghent University. A team of researchers trained in urbanism and political anthropology will generate original scientific data through collaborative multi-sited fieldwork in secondary cities in both DRCongo and Flanders, involving both qualitative and quantitative data collection methods. The team will investigate the transnational mobility and reconfiguration of conflict narratives and social tensions that emerge from the protracted civil war in Eastern DRC, and its impact on urban settlement patterns and home-making practices (with specific focus on the role of women) in the Congolese diaspora in Flanders. Ultimately, the project will deliver a novel transnational epistemological and analytical framework and empirically grounded theory-formation on the reconfiguration of urban spaces through the de- and re-territorialisation of violent conflict dynamics within transnational fields.
Situated at the intersection of conflict studies, migration studies and urban studies, this project sets out to investigate the formation of transnational ‘urban warscapes’ between cities in Eastern DRCongo and Flanders. From the specific perspective of female everyday spatial experiences, this project aims to provide a better spatial understanding of the dialectical relationship between migration, war and urbanisation across transnational geographies. In its aim to study transnational urbanism, this PhD position will be supervised from the Urban Design, Urbanism, Landscape and Planning (UULP) research section (Prof. Luce Beeckmans) at the Department of Architecture of KU Leuven. UULP seeks to deepen our understanding of the core socio-ecological challenges of our era, including planetary urbanisation, climate change, migration, social inequality and the housing crisis. UULP particularly focuses on the constructive and critical role of urban design, urbanism, landscape architecture and urban and regional planning in addressing these challenges and navigating their complexities. The PhD position will be co-supervised by the Conflict Research Group (Prof. Karen Büscher) at Ghent University.
Funding for a full-time, four-year PhD scholarship is available immediately. The research will be carried out at the Department of Architecture of KU Leuven in Heverlee (Leuven) with fieldwork planned in Flanders and Eastern DRCongo.