Fully Funded UKRI PhD Scholarship: Discourses of Trust in User-Generated Evidence (TRUE) (RS274)

Fully Funded UKRI PhD Scholarship: Discourses of Trust in User-generated Evidence (TRUE): Analysing the Impact of Deepfakes on Accountability Processes for Human Rights Violations

Funding providers: UKRI Frontier Research grant

Subject areas: Applied Linguistics (Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies - CADS)

Project start date: 

• 1 October 2023 (Enrolment open from mid-September)

Project supervisors: 

• Professor Nuria Lorenzo-Dus (Applied Linguistics)
• Professor Yvonne McDermott Rees (Law)

Aligned programme of study: PhD in Applied Linguistics

Mode of study: Full-time

Project description: 

TRUE is a five-year research project originally selected for funding by the European Research Council, which is funded by a UKRI Frontier Research grant [no. EP/X016021/1] from July 2022-June 2027. Through an innovative interdisciplinary methodology combining legal and linguistic analysis of trials, large online experiments, and mock jury trials, TRUE will develop the first systematic account of trust in user-generated evidence (such as photos and videos recorded by witnesses on their mobile phones), in the specific context of its use in human rights accountability processes.

We are seeking to appoint a PhD student in Applied Linguistics, with a focus on CADS, to collaborate on one of the key strands of this project, which will focus on investigating laypeople’s discourse leading to their make judgments about the trustworthiness of user-generated evidence, through a series of mock jury studies. We expect the student to conduct corpus-assisted analyses of the discourse (transcripts) of mock jury deliberations, perhaps also undertaking a multimodal analysis of specific aspects of the recorded deliberation sessions. There will be considerable scope for the successful candidate to shape their own research agenda within the parameters of the broader project and its research objectives. More information about the project can be found on www.trueproject.co.uk.

We invite interested individuals with a good undergraduate degree and Masters degree in Linguistics, especially Corpus Linguistics and Discourse Analysis, to apply for this fully-funded PhD position.

Applicants should include a 500-word research proposal, setting out a sample research question (within the scope of the TRUE project), the methods they would use to answer this research question, and the approach that would be used to analyse the data. Applicants should assume a dataset comprising between 100,000 and 500,000 words from 12 Mock jury transcripts, and 10-20 hours of video-recording material from the same mock jury settings will be made available to them for analysis.

Eligibility

Candidates must normally hold an undergraduate degree at 2.1 level and a master’s degree with a minimum overall grade at ‘Merit’. Alternatively, applicants with a UK first class honours degree (or Non-UK equivalent as defined by Swansea University) not holding a master’s degree, will be considered on an individual basis. See ‘country specific information for European and international applicants (available at the bottom of the page)'. 

English Language requirements: If applicable – IELTS 6.5 overall (with no individual component below 6.5) or Swansea recognised equivalent. Details on the Swansea University English Language entry policy can be found here.

This scholarship is open to candidates of any nationality.

Please visit our website for more information about this scholarship.

Funding

This scholarship covers the full cost of tuition fees and an annual stipend at UKRI rate (currently £17,668 for 2022/23).

Additional research expenses will also be available.

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