PhD Scholarship

Two fully funded PhD scholarships are open at the Australian National University for the international project Cultures of the Cryosphere: Infrastructures, Politics and Futures of Artificial Cooling, supported by a European Research Council Synergy Grant.

The project examines how artificial cooling is reshaping societies, environments, and futures through systems such as air conditioning, cryobanks, frozen supply chains, laboratories, and data centres. The two PhD projects are:

1) Air conditioning overload: The politics and futures of artificial cooling in urban Australia — an ethnographic study of heat, comfort, inequality, and the politics of cooling in Sydney.

2) Biobanking and cryogenic cultures of reproduction in Mumbai — an ethnographic investigation of cryobanks, frozen biospecimens, and the infrastructures of reproductive and biological value across global cold chains.

Both projects will be based in the School of Sociology at ANU and supervised by Professor Bronwyn Parry as part of an international collaboration spanning Australia and Germany.

This opportunity is especially relevant to applicants interested in anthropology, sociology, STS, geography, environmental humanities, infrastructure studies, reproductive technologies, ethnography, and the social study of cooling infrastructures.

Funding includes full PhD scholarships, a 10K top-up, and generous research funds. The post does not specify a deadline in the text provided.