Fully Funded PhD Opportunities in Psychology on Gendered Violence Against Women on Social Media

The application deadline has passed, and the process is complete. Please watch this space for future opportunities.

The successful candidate will be based at the Centre for Protecting Women Online at The Open University and supervised by academic staff at the School of Psychology and Counselling, who are members of the Centre and Human Behavior Stream Leads. The Centre for Protecting Women Online is funded by a £7.7 million grant from Research England. It is a vehicle for understanding and addressing challenges posed to women’s safety online through a novel, interdisciplinary and ambitious research agenda. This is 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. The Centre’s work aims to minimise anti-social behaviours online whilst promoting pro-social behaviours and help build tech/software that helps ensure accountability, credibility and facilitate justice. The Centre is led by Professor Olga Jurasz and the work of the Centre is delivered in five interwoven Work Streams: Law & Policy, Human Behaviour, The Future of Responsible Tech, Ethical and Responsible Tech/AI and Policing.

We welcome PhD proposals that address a key issue in relation to gendered online violence on social media.  In particular, we welcome proposals taking an intersectional and feminist approach to exploring (albeit not limited to) the following issues:

• Conceptualisations of online gendered violence and ‘harm’ as multifaceted and dynamic;
• Participatory, co-creation or creative methodological approaches to the study of online gendered violence;
• Social media interactions, practices and responses to witnessing online gendered violence (intervention, bystander apathy);
• The role of gendered identities and practices in relation to the prevention of online gendered violence;
• Gendered experiences of influencers in relation to online gendered violence.

Supervisors: Professor Rose Capdevila, Professor Lisa Lazard and Dr Nelli Stavropoulou, School of Psychology and Counselling, The Open University.