Junior docent Methoden en Statistiek

De werkzaamheden bestaan uit:

• werkgroepen begeleiden (en eventueel in een latere fase ook colleges geven);
• toetsen organiseren van grote bachelorvakken;
• ontwikkelen en innoveren van onderwijs op het gebied van Methoden en Statistiek.

Het gaat hierbij met name om Nederlandstalig bacheloronderwijs, maar we verzorgen ook Engelstalig onderwijs in verschillende opleidingen. Daarnaast zijn we ook actief binnen twee minors en een master op het gebied van Applied Data Science.

PhD: psychologische behandelingen voor jongeren met depressie verbeteren

In dit project onderzoeken we hoe individuele verschillen in cognitieve mechanismen die nodig zijn voor het leren van therapie, het succes van psychologische behandeling voor depressie kunnen voorspellen. Ons doel is om behandelingen voor depressie te optimaliseren door de behandeling te kiezen op basis van het individuele leerprofiel van jongeren met depressieve klachten (18-25 jaar oud).

Als promovendus ben je verantwoordelijk voor het ontwerpen, opzetten, uitvoeren van onderzoek en het publiceren over je resultaten. Je zult je bevindingen presenteren op nationale en internationale conferenties, en je zult deel uitmaken van de Onderzoeksschool Experimentele Psychopathologie. Je krijgt de kans om onderdeel te worden van een breed internationaal netwerk, inclusief experts op het gebied van experimentele psychopathologie, psychometrie en computational psychiatry. Het team van promotor en co-promotoren bestaat uit dr. Geert-Jan Will, dr. Sanne Bruijniks, prof. dr. Iris Engelhard en prof. dr. Jaap Denissen en je wordt lid van het Experimental Psychopathology lab.

Het project heeft drie doelen:

1. het identificeren van betrouwbare neurocognitieve markers die belangrijk zijn voor het leren van psychotherapie (door neurocognitieve taken te combineren met computationele modellen van hersenen en cognitie);
2. onderzoeken of individuele verschillen in neurocognitieve markers succesvol leren van verschillende psychotherapeutische procedures kunnen voorspellen;
3. onderzoeken of het toewijzen van patiënten aan specifieke therapeutische procedures op basis van hun neurocognitieve “profielen” leidt tot betere behandeluitkomsten (c.q. een sterkere vermindering van depressieve symptomen).

Primaire verantwoordelijken:

• ontwerpen van onderzoek (inclusief de ontwikkeling van stimuli en experimenten en het programmeren van computertaken);
• werving en dataverzameling bij jonge mensen met subklinische depressieve symptomen;
• verwerken en analyseren van data;
• schrijven van manuscripten voor publicatie in nationale en internationale peer-reviewed tijdschriften;
• schrijven van een proefschrift.

Docent klinische psychologie

Kerntaak van de docent is het bijdragen aan het onderwijs in de Nederlandstalige bacheloropleiding Psychologie (met name in de Klinische Psychologie cursussen) en de Engelstalige masteropleiding Clinical Psychology. Het onderwijs bestaat uit het verzorgen van werkgroepen en eventueel colleges bij verschillende (klinische) cursussen, het nakijken van opdrachten en tentamens en eventueel de coördinatie van een cursus. Ook zul je (klinische) stages begeleiden binnen de master Clinical Psychology en lever je, binnen het docententeam, een bijdrage aan de ontwikkeling en kwaliteit van de opleiding.

Deze functie bij de afdeling Klinische psychologie omvat 90% onderwijsactiviteiten en 10% opleidings- en ontwikkelingsactiviteiten.

PhD: Improving Psychological Treatments for Young People with Depression

In the position of PhD candidate, you are responsible for conducting research studies (including design, data collection, and data analysis) and publishing about the findings. You will present your findings at national and international conferences, and you will be part of the Postgraduate School for Experimental Psychopathology. You will get to chance to be embedded within a broad international network, including experts in experimental psychopathology, psychometrics and computational psychiatry. The supervisory team for the PhD project comprises Dr Geert-Jan Will, Dr Sanne Bruijniks, Professor Iris Engelhard, and Professor Jaap Denissen. You will be a member of Utrecht’s Experimental Psychopathology lab.

The project has three aims:

1. identifying reliable neurocognitive markers that are important for learning from psychotherapy (through combing neurocognitive tasks with computational models of brain and cognition);
2. investigating whether individual differences in neurocognitive markers can predict successful learning from distinct psychotherapeutic procedures;
3. investigating whether matching depressed individuals to specific psychotherapeutic procedures based on their neurocognitive profiles can improve treatment outcomes (i.e., greater reduction of depressive symptoms).

The primary responsibilities include:

• designing research studies (including stimulus/task development and programming experiments);
• recruitment and collection of human subject data from people with subclinical levels of depression;
• processing and analysing data;
• writing manuscripts for publication;
• writing a dissertation.

2 PhD Positions in Literary and Cultural Studies: Ecologies of Violence

As a PhD candidate you will be working on a subproject within the Consolidator Grant project EcoViolence (2024–2029) funded by the European Research Council (ERC) and directed by Dr Susanne C. Knittel (Principal Investigator, PI) at the department of Languages, Literature, and Communication. EcoViolence is an interdisciplinary, transnational, and comparative study of the cultural imaginary of environmental violence. The project’s aim is to understand how contemporary culture frames and remembers environmental degradation as violence; how it can make visible the deep historical roots that tie eco-violence to other histories of violence, especially colonialism and genocide; and how it articulates and reflects on questions of guilt, responsibility, and implication. EcoViolence will bring together research in cultural memory studies and ecocriticism in order to develop an innovative ecological model for the study of violence, its memory and representation. Furthermore, the project explores how these representations harness affect and emotion to promote critical self-reflection. The project focuses on narrative and visual media and takes a comparative, multilingual, and media-specific approach.

Position 1: Poetics of Eco-violence
This subproject will contribute to recent scholarship on eco-poetics by exploring the aesthetic, political, and affective affordances of literature, specifically poetry, for representing eco-violence, past and ongoing. Special attention will be paid to how contemporary poets are reimagining genres and poetic conventions to represent the multidirectional links between eco-violence, genocide, and colonialism. The subproject will explore the interaction between poetry and activism, social and environmental justice, focusing particularly on how contemporary eco-poetry frames questions of guilt, responsibility, and implication. The approach will be transnational/transcultural and multilingual, and the methodology will be comparative analysis and close reading, coupled with discourse analysis. The PhD will draw on recent scholarship in cultural memory studies, ecocriticism – specifically eco-poetics, and affective formalism to analyse the literary and poetic techniques, as well as the formal affordances of these texts. The subproject will also consider how poetry reflects on the role of language in perpetuating as well as resisting eco-violence.

Position 2: Images of Eco-violence
This subproject will focus on the aesthetic, political, and affective dimensions of contemporary documentary film. It will contribute to current debates on the role of visual culture in representing eco-violence and its links to other histories and structures of violence. As an investigative genre par excellence, based on a discourse of evidence, truth, and social representation, documentaries are a particularly fruitful site for the representation of large-scale violence and a critical engagement with questions of guilt, responsibility, and implication. The corpus will consist of a range of different types of documentaries: from mainstream productions to more experimental, independent films. The approach will be transnational/transcultural and multilingual, and the methodology will be comparative, visual, and media analysis as well as discourse analysis. The PhD will draw on recent scholarship in cultural memory studies, ecocriticism – specifically eco-cinema, and affect theory to analyse the cinematic and rhetorical techniques, as well as the use of mediation, remediation, testimony, data, and evidence in these films. The PhD will furthermore explore the place of these films within a larger media ecology, focusing especially on the growing number of environmental film festivals.

Each PhD candidate will have the following tasks and responsibilities:

• conducting research for and completing a PhD thesis within the period of appointment;
• publishing one peer-reviewed journal article or book chapter within the period of appointment;
• co-editing one special journal issue with the PI;
• helping with the organization of workshops and an international conference;
• participating in project meetings, and closely collaborating with the other members of the research team;
• helping with setting up and managing project data;
• assisting with knowledge dissemination and other activities of the project;
• presenting research results at national and international workshops and conferences;
• participating in the ICON and Faculty of Humanities PhD training programmes.

The PhD researchers will be embedded within the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICON) and affiliated with the Utrecht Forum for Memory Studies and the Network for Environmental Humanities.