Project Description:
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.

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.

Your Role in the Project

You will contribute to Work Package 2 which examines the ethical dilemmas faced by national policymakers implementing solidarity-oriented migration policies in Brazil and Spain.
This position offers a distinctive opportunity to:

• Develop an ambitious, original doctoral project within a high-profile ERC research environment;
  
• Receive close supervision and structured mentoring from the PI and postdoctoral members of the team;
  
• Gain advanced training in migration studies within an interdisciplinary and thematically focused PhD program
  
• Gain training and hands on experience in comparative qualitative methods and theory-driven research
  
• Conduct research on a highly topical and globally relevant issue
  
• Build an international academic profile through publications and conference participation
  

Your research will form the basis of a cumulative PhD dissertation (article-based), consisting of four papers.

Your tasks:

• Design and implement a comparative PhD research project on national migration policies in Brazil and Spain
  
• Conduct qualitative empirical research (e.g. document analysis, interviews, fieldwork)
  
• Develop and submit a cumulative PhD dissertation within the project timeframe
  
• Participation and completion of PhD courses according to the curriculum Migration Studies
  
• Contribute to high-quality academic publications and project outputs
  
• Participate in international academic exchange (conferences, workshops, research stays)
  
• Contribute to the collaborative research environment of the ERC team
  
• Support project-related activities, including dissemination and event organisation
  

We look forward to receiving your online application by 29 June 2026.

The University for Continuing Education Krems sees high innovation potential in the diversity of its employees and is committed to diversity as a guiding principle. We therefore explicitly invite people with disabilities and/or chronic illnesses who meet the required profile criteria to apply for the position.

Your application should include:

• Cover letter (max. 2 pages)
  
• Curriculum Vitae
  
• Copies of degrees and transcripts
  
• Two writing samples (e.g. Master’s thesis, seminar paper, or academic publication)
  
• A 2–3 page research outline describing the proposed doctoral project
  
• 3 contact details for references
  

The research outline should address:

1. The ethical dilemmas likely to arise in national migration policies in Brazil and Spain
   
2. The proposed research design and methodology
   
3. Relevant theoretical and empirical literature, including additional sources beyond the project proposal
   

For further details, please consult the project proposal.