Dear colleagues, SPERI at the University of Sheffield is currently advertising a 4 year PhD scholarship in the area of green political economy. It is a generous scheme, and applications from international students are welcome. All the details are below. Please share with potential candidates and networks.
Best wishes, Hayley -- Dr Hayley Stevenson <https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/politics/people/academic/hayley-stevenson> Reader in Politics and International Relations University of Sheffield *Recently published: *Contemporary Discourses of Green Political Economy (open access) <http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1523908X.2015.1118681> ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Craig P Berry <[email protected]> Date: 2 February 2016 at 12:15 Subject: PhD studentship vacancy at SPERI, University of Sheffield: Sustainable resource use and economic growth To: Martin PA Craig <[email protected]>, Hayley Stevenson < [email protected]> The contemporary global economic crisis and environmental crisis are intimately related. Yet the existing political economy literature has little to say about the relationship between economic growth and environmental sustainability. The Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute <http://speri.dept.shef.ac.uk/> (SPERI) is therefore seeking to recruit a doctoral researcher for an innovative, cross-disciplinary research project which explores the economy/environment relationship. At its core, the doctoral research will reflect on a single, disarmingly simple, core research question: *what is sustainable resource use and what are its implications for economic growth?* SPERI is an inter-disciplinary research institute which aims to bring together leading international researchers, policy-makers, journalists and opinion-formers to develop new ways of thinking about the economic and political challenges posed for the whole world by the current combination of financial crisis, shifting economic power and environmental threat. Developing new ways of thinking about the economic impact of environmental change is therefore at the heart of SPERI’s mission as a research centre. By focusing on ‘green growth’ and sustainable resource use, this studentship would form an important part of SPERI’s ongoing research agenda around the relationships between politics, the economy and climate change. *The Max Batley Grantham Scholarship* is organised in partnership with the Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures <http://grantham.sheffield.ac.uk/>. This four-year studentship would encompass an extensive training programme, and opportunities for engagement with the public, policy-makers and industry, as part of the Grantham Scholars <http://grantham.sheffield.ac.uk/training/> programme. This will enable the successful applicant to develop world-class skills in both research and leadership, so that he or she may play an important public role in efforts to address climate change. The project envisaged will require, firstly, consideration of how we might develop techniques to evaluate and measure the aggregate sustainability of an economy’s resource use. However, and secondly, it will be necessary also to consider if, and how, moving towards more sustainable forms of resource use conflicts with the economy’s prevailing growth model or developmental path. Put simply, we need to decide whether it is possible to envisage environmentally sustainable growth or whether environmental sustainability entails, at minimum, and on conventional measures of economic performance, a permanent recession. It is too often assumed by supporters of contemporary models of capitalism, even where sympathetic to fears about environmental destruction, that sustainability and growth can happily coincide through greater levels of investment in green technologies, creating jobs and wealth at the same time as responding to climate change. Equally, it is too often assumed by advocates of radical adaptation to environmental destruction that what is required, above all, is attitudinal change within consumer-based economies, that is, that society must simply learn to live within its environmental means. Even if this were possible, eschewing the possibility of economic growth raises acute distributional questions that any post-growth order must address. The successful candidate will address these dilemmas by considering the implications of sustainable resource use for the models of growth and development an economy might pursue. They will seek to review existing metrics for measuring sustainable resource use, and use empirical research into different forms of economic activity to explore whether these suitably capture relationships with economic growth. It is expected that the successful candidate will develop a series of case studies of different economic sectors (eg. agri-food industry, resource-intense manufacturing) across particular geographies, conducted using both quantitative and qualitative evidence, in order to explore the potential implications of greater resource sustainability. Case studies would enable reflection on the sustainability of a range of different growth models, providing a platform for future inter-disciplinary research auditing the sustainability of emerging forms of capitalist development. The doctoral researcher appointed will work closely with the existing SPERI team, but also other Grantham Scholars and other researchers based at the University studying natural resource use. They will be expected to write and research academic papers, but also policy interventions, debate pieces and blog posts. The successful candidate is likely to be someone with a background in political economy and/or natural resource management (studied from a social science perspective), and with experience in the use of a range of research methods. A multi-disciplinary supervisory team will enable the successful candidate to make important contributions to scholarship across a range of fields. The studentship will be supervised primarily by Professor Colin Hay <http://speri.dept.shef.ac.uk/people/colin-hay/>. The successful candidate will based at SPERI (with research formally accredited by the Department of Politics <https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/politics>) but also play an active and integral role in the Grantham Centre. Professor James Wilsdon <https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/politics/people/academic/james-wilsdon> (Politics), Dr Craig Berry <http://speri.dept.shef.ac.uk/people/craig-berry/> (SPERI) and Professor Peter Horton <https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/mbb/staff/horton> (Molecular Biology and Biotechnology) will support the project as second supervisors. This four-year studentship will be fully funded by the Grantham Centre at Home/EU rates. Support for travel and consumables (RTSG) will also be made available at standard rate of £2,627 per annum, with an additional one-off allowance of £1,000 for a computer in the first year. Students will receive an annual stipend of £17,335 in 2015/16, rising with inflation thereafter. For more information about the studentship, please contact Laure Astill at *[email protected] <[email protected]>* or visit http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/politics/study/research. To apply for the Department of Politics’ PhD programme, please visit http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/postgraduate/research/apply/applying and specify that you are applying for the ‘Max Batley Grantham Scholarship’. Applications must be received by *7 March 2016*. Short interviews with shortlisted candidates will be held via Skype or telephone *24 March 2016 *between 09:00 and 12:00 GMT. -- Dr Craig Berry Deputy Director Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute (SPERI) University of Sheffield [email protected] 0114 222 8348 / 07717 783 423 @craigpberry http://craigpberry.co.uk/ http://speri.dept.shef.ac.uk/about/people/craig-berry/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "gep-ed" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
