There is a new job vacancy for a 3-year postdoctoral Research Scientist position at The Helmholtz-Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity (HIFMB) in Oldenburg, Germany, offering an opportunity for an early career scholar to work on the carceral seas.

The HIFMB is a new institute on interdisciplinary marine biodiversity research, established on the campus of the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, which is home to the Institute for Social Sciences, where carceral geographer Dr Jennifer Turner is based. The Institute is developing ties to the HIFMB through various projects including some of Jennifer’s recent research developments on carceral seas.

The postdoc would be appointed to the recently established Marine Governance Research Group led by Professor Kimberley Peters. Accordingly, the HIFMB joins expertise in marine functional ecology, data science and theory with great social science and humanities profiles.

The link to the full advert is below, but your attention is particularly drawn to the noted desirable criteria of: Experience working with key conceptual ideas such as borders, boundaries and carcerality, as well as space, power and territory.

Although certainly a slightly new direction for carceral scholars, the considerations about crime/sanction management at sea might be a welcome new research trajectory for scholars who have, in particular, experience in qualitative methods.

The position

This Research Scientist position will work to spatialise understandings of monitoring, reporting and sanctioning at sea. Despite of the proliferation of marine management and conservation tools to steward over and protect ocean life and resources, there remains a gap in the effectiveness of those tools through limited regimes of monitoring, reporting and sanctioning. This position aims to “follow” cases of marine policy contraventions to track narratives of monitoring, reporting and sanctioning at sea to understand its presence and absence. Moreover, it will use ideas from geography to spatialise understandings of how bounded modes of governance for biodiversity succeed or fail. In doing so, the project will bring insights into possibilities for more effective routes to marine governance (whilst also critically assessing what constitutes an “effective” regime and for what and whom). Moreover, it is intended that the position will use such investigations to also progress spatial theories of borders, containment and control and their application for marine biodiversity outcomes.

2 PhD positions and a further Research Scientist vacancy are also advertised. These are not related to carcerality but you might wish to pass these along to anyone currently on the job search.  https://www.awi.de/en/work-study/jobs/job-offer.html