Research Associate

The University is looking for a Research Associate who will make a leading contribution to the ERC-funded project MORTALMED (Mortal Medicine: The Social Life of a Death-Inducing Pharmaceutical), working with Dr Marcos Freire de Andrade Neves and the wider MORTALMED research team. The successful candidate will join an internationally oriented and collaborative project that traces the circulation of sodium pentobarbital across transnational networks and local fields of use. MORTALMED examines how the drug moves through legal, medical, commercial, and political settings, focusing especially on assisted dying procedures in Switzerland, lethal injection protocols in the United States, and veterinary markets in Mexico. Through this focus, the project explores how death is organised, authorised, contested, and mediated through pharmaceuticals, institutions, legal frameworks, and everyday practices.

The postholder will conduct ethnographic research in Switzerland, contributing to the subproject Lethal Prescriptions: Sodium Pentobarbital and Assisted Dying in Switzerland. The subproject examines how pentobarbital is sourced, prescribed, obtained, stored, and used, and how access to the drug is shaped by medical assessment, organisational procedures, pharmaceutical regulation, and legal oversight. The research will follow people seeking assisted dying through assessment and preparation, examining how requests are considered, medical approval is granted, and a planned death becomes authorised. It will explore how these practices connect questions of personal agency, suffering, dignity, professional responsibility, and public legitimacy.

Pentobarbital will be approached both as an object of research and as a methodological entry point into the social, legal, medical, and ethical worlds that make assisted dying possible. The successful candidate will be expected to undertake participant observation and interviews with assisted dying organisation staff, physicians, pharmacists, and people seeking assisted dying, alongside analysis of relevant regulations, medico-legal documents, court cases, and public debates. Applications are also welcome from candidates interested in developing further methodological and creative ways of engaging with pentobarbital, such as chemoethnography or experimental approaches to tracing pharmaceutical circulation, regulation, and use.

The successful candidate will be expected to undertake fieldwork, analyse and interpret research material, contribute to academic publications and other project outputs, and support the conceptual development of MORTALMED, including its analysis of necrosocialities: the relational configurations linking people, institutions, technologies, and substances through practices of death and dying.

Informal enquiries should be directed to Dr. Marcos Freire de Andrade Neves on Marcos.Freire@glasgow.ac.uk

This post is full time (35 hours per week) and has funding available for up to 4 years in the first instance. Relocation assistance will be provided where appropriate.

All applicants must have the right to live and work in the UK or be eligible to obtain permission to work in the UK.

This role may be eligible for sponsorship under the Skilled Worker visa route, subject to meeting the relevant Home Office requirements, including any applicable tradeable points criteria. Further information can be found on the University of Glasgow’s UKVI Website.

For research and academic roles, we will also consider whether the Global Talent visa route may be available, subject to individual eligibility.

For more information and to apply please click the 'Apply' button above

Closing date: 4^th November 2026 at 23:45pm

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