Roger Norum

Doctoral Researcher in Anthropology at the University of Oulu’s Department of Cultural Anthropology, within the Faculty of Humanities, in the EU-funded MITIME doctoral network. The project sits at the intersection of migration, temporality, labour, and urban change in post-industrial Europe. The doctoral researcher will develop an original PhD project in Cultural Anthropology under the provisional theme “Imagining and Representing Urban Pasts and Futures.” The research examines how industrialisation and de-industrialisation, together with past and present labour migration, shape migrants’ experiences of settlement, belonging, home-making, and urban futures in post-industrial settings in Finland and/or Germany. The position is embedded in a wider international network of seven European universities and includes intersectoral collaboration. The project involves two secondments: one with the City of Oulu, focusing on policies and initiatives related to labour migration, urban development, and sustainability; and one at Ruhr University Bochum, where the doctoral researcher will work on policy analysis and mobile methods for documenting the social geographies of migration, labour, and societal change. Methodologically, the research is expected to combine multimodal ethnography with critical discourse analysis. Possible directions include labour and migration histories in urban development, migrant relationships with local communities and labour markets over time, and the ways actors shape visions of urban futures. The project may also engage Indigenous, translocal, and gender-diverse perspectives. Fieldwork is expected to focus primarily on Oulu and/or Bochum, though other case-study locations may be proposed if they clearly fit the project aims. The position is supervised by Prof. Roger Norum and Prof. Thora Herrmann at the University of Oulu, together with Dr. Katrin Menke at Ruhr University Bochum. The post offers a structured doctoral training environment with interdisciplinary guidance, mentoring, transferable-skills development, and international secondments within the MITIME network.