Zur Verstärkung unseres Teams Department for Migration and Globalisation
at the University for Continuing Education Krems (Austria) invites applications for a Postdoctoral Researcher (Post-Doc). The position is full-time for five years and is expected to start on 1 November 2026 or shortly thereafter.

We are seeking an outstanding candidate with a strong international publication record, demonstrated project experience, preferable in a coordination role, and a clear interest in theory development. The successful candidate will act as a coordinating postdoctoral researcher, working closely with the Principal Investigator (PI) on both the intellectual and organizational leadership of the project.

The project team includes the PI, a coordinating postdoctoral researcher, and five researchers (postdoctoral fellows and PhD candidates), each leading a complementary empirical work package. Together, the team will generate comparative insights that feed into a shared theoretical framework. gelangt folgende Position zur Besetzung:

Inserat Nr. SB26-0088

Postdoctoral Researcher in Migration Studies (m/f/d) ERC Co-coordination

Ihre Aufgaben

This position is part of the ERC-funded project "Ethics in Action: Navigating Ethical Dilemmas of Migrant Solidarity", led by Professor Julia Mourão Permoser.

Focusing on policies and practices of solidarity with irregular and precarious migrants, "Ethics in Action" develops a novel, actor-centred framework to understand how policymakers and civil society actors navigate ethical dilemmas in real-world contexts. Rather than treating ethics as abstract theory, the project investigates ethics in action—that is, the everyday processes of decision-making, justification, and compromise through which political actors respond to morally conflicting situations.

The project brings together political theory and empirical research in an innovative way. Through in-depth qualitative fieldwork across multiple world regions, it examines how five different types of actors—national policymakers, local policymakers, labour unions, faith-based organizations and facilitators of movement—experience, interpret, and respond to ethical dilemmas in practice. These cases are systematically compared across Global North and Global South contexts to identify patterns and develop a new theory of decision-making under conditions of value conflict.

By focusing on political agency under constraint, "Ethics in Action" opens up a new research agenda that goes beyond existing approaches to polarization and value conflict. It shows how actors continue to act—even under conditions of deep moral tension—and how their decisions reshape their political identities and the meaning of solidarity itself.

You will act as a key intellectual partner to the PI, contributing to both the coordination and the conceptual development of the project. This includes co-supervising early career researchers and advancing the project’s research design and theoretical framework.

You will co-lead three central work packages — Overall Comparison and Theory Development, Visual Methods and Artistic Dissemination, and Stakeholder and Society Dialogue—in close collaboration with the PI.

A central component of this role is to contribute to the project’s overarching theory-building agenda by integrating comparative empirical insights into a coherent analytical framework.

You will also be expected to develop an independent research agenda and contribute actively to the life of the department.

This is a unique opportunity to:

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