Postdoctoral Research Associate (PDRA)

Location: Milton Keynes

Please quote reference: 21529

Terms: Fixed term, for 3 years, full time - 37 hours per week.

About the centre

The Centre for Protecting Women Online is funded by a £7.7 million grant from Research England. The centre is based in the Faculty of Business and Law and will collaborate closely with other Faculties,  including the School of Psychology & Counselling, based in The Faculty of Social Sciences. It will be a vehicle for understanding and addressing challenges posed to women’s safety online through a novel, interdisciplinary and ambitious research agenda. This will be combined with cross-sectoral, collaborative outputs and interventions which inform law, policy, technology development and practice to reduce online harms suffered by women and girls; minimise anti-social behaviours online whilst promoting pro-social behaviours and help build tech/ software that helps ensure accountability, credibility and helps facilitate justice. The work of the Centre will be delivered through a management and five interwoven Work Streams. Professors Capdevila and Lazard, who are based in the School of Psychology & Counselling, will lead on the development of understanding of online interactions and how they might function to enable or hinder problematic or violent behaviour.

The role  

The Open University is recruiting a highly motivated Post Doctoral Research Associate (PDRA) to work in the Centre for Protecting Women Online funded by Research England. The successful candidate will work closely with Professors Capdevila and Lazard leading the Human Behaviour Workstream and Professor Jurasz, Director of the Centre for Protecting Women Online, who leads the Centre’s cross-disciplinary research team. The successful candidate will work closely with Professor Rose Capdevila and Professor Lisa Lazard who are based in the School of Psychology & Counselling. We are looking for an adaptive PDRA who would seek to play an active part in building the research culture in the centre. The postholder will use their research knowledge, skills and grant bidding experience to provide support for research activities and bidding. As well as facilitating the bids of others, they will have an opportunity to collaborate with researchers in the centre to initiate, shape and develop funding applications which develop their own research. They will be assisting with research outputs, including presentation and publication and contribute to/support current research related activities and projects in the Centre. Relevant training and professional development opportunities will be made available.

Skills and experience

The candidate is to hold a PhD in Psychology or related field and have familiarity with critical and feminist approaches to gendered violence. They need to have expertise in qualitative and quantitative research methods and knowledge and familiarity with research on online environments, in particular social media. Experience of grant bidding to external funders is essential for this post as well as experience of authoring or co-authoring academic outputs (e.g., journal articles, books, research reports). A strong record of research and/or knowledge exchange that is commensurate to the position is required.

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