PhD position on the history of medical plastics

About the position

The Institute for Health and Society is recruiting 1 PhD position to do research on the history of plastics in healthcare. In this PhD position, you will join an interdisciplinary and multinational team of researchers in the Wellcome Trust-funded Discovery Grant project ‘After the Single Use: Rethinking Medical Devices for Reuse, Resilience and Renewal’. It is a five-year anthropological and historical research project examining the history, circulation, and discard of single-use plastics in global healthcare with the aim of understanding how and why we came to naturalize and normalize disposability in healthcare and ways to collaborate to reduce it. The project involves research teams in 8 different countries in Asia, Africa, Europe and the US. This PhD position will be part of the Norwegian team and focus on the history of healthcare plastics. The appointment is a full-time position for a period of three years. 

After the Single Use is a bold global cooperative across four continents that promises to develop a new field of critical arts, humanities, and social science research on medical waste and circular healthcare economies. The production, circulation, and disposal of single-use medical plastics have a direct effect on human health and inflict widespread environmental damage. It was not always this way. In a relatively short period of time, we have naturalized the use of single-use products and then forgotten that there was ever any alternative.  Today there is growing international recognition that we need to move to a more sustainable, circular economy for medical equipment and devices. What would it take to achieve this? Bringing together anthropologists and historians from eight countries After the Single Use will employ innovative historical and ethnographic methods to trace shifting logics and value systems that made disposability into medical common sense, analyse the long lifecycles of single-use medical devices designed for disposal, and establish collaborations with policymakers, activists and engineers/designers to build circular healthcare solutions.   

About the PhD project

The PhD student will join the research team based at the University of Oslo. The PhD project will explore the historical roots of current systems of disposability. It could be for instance by exploring the history of one disposable medical device building on a historical (and possibly also ethnographic) investigation, exploring its emergence and advertisement as a commercial object and its introduction and development in the healthcare practice in social democracy, how it was normalized and naturalized (or not) and how it was affected by social and cultural processes of institutional and infrastructural change. Your research will be carried out in close collaboration with the international research team in After the Single Use, including the NGO Health Care without Harm. The PhD student will also contribute to other project-related tasks and activities.

We are seeking a candidate with a master's degree in the social sciences or humanities with good knowledge of the health sector, obtained either by research or practical research. We also welcome candidates with medical or other health sciences degrees, as long as they can demonstrate experience with humanities and/or social science research.

More about the position

This position is intended to help you develop a research profile and competencies. To this end, the main focus of this position is to conduct research, including publications and dissemination. In addition, you will be expected to actively contribute to the broader research agenda and environment of the After the Single Use project, including project workshops, conference presentations, and regular project meetings. The position may also provide teaching experience in a limited extension or other competencies relevant to your future career.

The PhD candidate will be employed by the Institute of Health and Society (Helsam) at the University of Oslo. Academic staff are formally employed by the Institute but have their primary workplace and disciplinary home within one of its departments. The position will be based at the Section for Medical Humanities, one of three sections in the Department of Community Medicine and Global Health. The department is a dynamic, internationally oriented environment that brings together researchers from medicine, the social sciences, and the humanities. Its research spans global health, medical anthropology, epidemiology, and medical history, fostering a collegial and creative academic culture.

In the Section for Medical Humanities anthropologists and historians work together to investigate the cultural, historical, and social dimensions of health and medicine — from everyday experiences of illness to the ways medical knowledge, technologies, and policies shape societies.

Responsibilities

• Lead the development of the case study on the history of disposability in healthcare, including: research design, development of methods, writing of protocol and application for ethics, taking a person-centred approach to the global story of health care plastics and waste. Ongoing refinement of research design and implementation (20%)
• Conduct historical and ethnographic research on the history of one disposable device from production to emergence as commercial object, but focusing on its use in practice in healthcare institutions and its current use; including: stakeholder mapping, grey literature reviews, archive research, ethnographic research, and oral history interviews (20%)
• Work closely with the Norwegian project lead and Healthcare Without Harm to develop and implement the Norwegian part of the project’s communications and stakeholder engagement plan, knowledge exchange and impact activities, and events related to governance of plastics in health care in Norway (20%)
• Independently prepare and write academic publications related to the case study (at least one monograph and two articles) and contribute to co-authorship of wider project publications with partners in other countries and other outputs (e.g. blog posts, executive summaries, policy briefings, podcasts, etc.) (30%)
• Present research publications at academic and policy conferences and meetings (5%)
• Contribute to the overall project activities (organising events, producing website content, data management and storage, etc.), including international travel for project meetings and events (5%)

Qualifications

In this role, you must 

• Hold a degree equivalent to a Norwegian master’s degree in social science or the humanities, or a master's equivalent in medicine or health science with demonstrated experience and knowledge of the social sciences and/or the humanities
• Have excellent written and oral proficiency in English
• Have excellent organisational and administrative skills, including time management
• Have demonstrated good academic writing skills
• Have the ability to contribute to the production of high-quality academic outputs
• Be good at communicating complex information clearly, orally, and in writing, to a range of different groups

In this role, it is an advantage if you have 

• Good written and oral proficiency in Norwegian and/or proficiency in one of the Sami languages
• A fit and complementarity with the project’s theoretical and methodological approach
• Have an interest in developing skills in creative and collaborative research methodologies together with other researchers from different parts of the world
• Experience in supporting academic events or seminars
• Knowledge of the social science and/ or history of plastics, infrastructure and health systems
• Knowledge of sustainability in the health sector in Norway
• Experience of working interdisciplinary and across cultures and regions

We are looking for a person who

• Is committed to doing impactful research and eager to develop the necessary skills
• Has the ability to work effectively both independently and as a member of a team
• Is willing to make an effort to contribute to a positive research community both among fellow phd researchers at UiO and in the project team as a whole - and has ideas about what such contributions could be
• Is good to communicate about their progress and about challenges in work
• Is engaged and wants to make a difference with their research
• Is organized and contributes substantially to the progress of the project as a whole
• Wants to be part of the intellectual and research life at the Institute for Health and Society through physical attendance for a minimum of 2-3 days a week on campus, and attendance at seminars and events

Employment in the position is based on a comprehensive assessment of all qualification requirements applicable to the position, including personal qualifications.

We need different perspectives in our work 

UiO is an open and internationally oriented comprehensive university that strives to be an inclusive and diverse workplace and academic environment. You can read more about UiO’s work on equality, inclusion, and diversity at uio.no.

We fulfill our mission most effectively when we draw upon our variety of experiences, backgrounds, and perspectives. We are looking for great colleagues—could you be the next one?

We will do our best to accommodate your needs. Relevant adjustments may include modifications to working hours, task adaptations, digital, technical, or physical adjustments, or other practical measures.

If you have an immigrant background, a disability, or CV gaps (Norwegian), we encourage you to indicate this in the job application portal. At least one qualified candidate from each group will be invited for an interview. In this context, disability is defined as an applicant who identifies as having a disability that requires workplace or employment-related accommodations. For more details about the requirements, please refer to the Employer portal (Norwegian). The selections made in the job application portal are used for anonymized statistics that all state employers include in their annual reports. More information about gender equality initiatives at UiO can be found here.

We hope you will apply for the position with us!

We can offer 

• Exciting and meaningful tasks in an organization with an important societal mission, contributing to knowledge development, education, and enlightenment that promote sustainable, fair, and knowledge-based societal development
• Involvement in a large international research project that provides opportunities to build a network with scholars researching political elites around the world
• Opportunity to develop your interidisciplinary skills through working with scholars with competencies ranging from medicine and public health to anthropology and history and art
• Attractive UiO welfare benefits
• Norway’s capital with its easy access to beautiful nature and rich cultural life.
• Committed colleagues in a good working environment. 
• Good welfare schemes
• A workplace with good development and career opportunities
• Membership in Statens Pensjonskasse
• Salary in position as Doctoral Research Fellow, position code 1017 in salary range NOK 550 800- 610 000, depending on competence and experience. From the salary, 2 percent is deducted in statutory contributions to the State Pension Fund

Read more about the benefits of working in the public sector at Employer Portal.

Application

Your application should include:

• A CV of no more than two pages.
• A full university transcript, showing the courses/modules taken and marks for individual courses and for a master thesis 
• Two references from academic staff who have direct experience of your work, including (if possible) your master thesis supervisor.
• A writing sample of between 4,000-10,000 words (eg coursework essay or dissertation)

A personal statement of up to two pages that addresses the following questions and issues (in any format or order):

• Why you are interested in this PhD project
• Your relevant experience and training for this PhD project
• How you would want to develop the project as a historical case study, including any particular issues and questions you would want to explore
• Areas of scholarship and literature you would be interested in engaging with and contributing to as part of the project
• Methodological approaches and tools that you would look to bring to the project or develop as part of the project
• Your longer-term career plans and how this project will help you to progress them, including any training that you would hope to receive as part of the project

Application with attachments must be submitted via our recruitment system Jobbnorge, click "Apply for the position".

When applying for the position, we ask you to retrieve your education results from Vitnemålsportalen.no. If your education results are not available through Vitnemålsportalen, we ask you to upload copies of your transcripts or grades. Please note that all documentation must be in English or a Scandinavian language.

General information

The best qualified candidates will invited for interviews. 

Applicant lists can be published in accordance with Norwegian Freedom of Information Act § 25. When you apply for a position with us, your name will appear on the public applicant list. It is possible to request to be excluded from this list. You must justify why you want an exemption from publication and we will then decide whether we can grant your request. If we cannot, you will hear from us.

Please refer to Regulations for the Act on universities and colleges chapter 3 (Norwegian),  Guidelines concerning appointment to post doctoral and research posts at UiO and Regulations for the degree of Philosophiae Doctor (PhD) at the University of Oslo.

The University of Oslo has a transfer agreement with all employees that is intended to secure the rights to all research results etc.