The Department of Translation, Interpreting and Communication is looking for two scientific collaborators for the project PRECOBIAS, funded by the Civil Society Empowerment programme of the European Union. *Duration of the contract: between 3 and 6 months*, starting in October or November 2019 *SUMMARY OF THE PROJECT* PRECOBIAS is a user-centred counter-narrative campaign project that centres around the mental processes and cognitive biases at stake when youngsters, especially the ones either vulnerable to radicalisation or already radicalized, are faced with extremist/terrorist discourses on social media. The project aims to counter radicalisation in the long term by enhancing digital resilience and critical thinking of the target audience. PRECOBIAS helps them get to know themselves better by revealing the mental processes and cognitive biases that underlie their interpretations and analyses. PRECOBIAS aims to bring about behaviour change, dissuading target youngsters from promoting extremist content online. To reach these objectives, PRECOBIAS targets: - vulnerable and radicalized youngsters directly through a social media campaign, comprising a test to increase selfawareness, videos and an Instagram contest; - the social workers and teachers who are in charge of the target youngsters by providing them a MOOC about cognitive biases and radicalisation, together with 2 specific toolkits with ready-to-use activities; - civil-society organizations across the EU with an international one-day training programme that will afford them to train professionals involved with counter extremism at local level, to increase PRECOBIAS impact. The PRECOBIAS campaign will be based on tangible evidence about cognitive biases, radicalisation and social media and is the result of preliminary multidisciplinary scientific research, together with grass-roots professional experiences of civil society organizations, teachers and social workers alike. PRECOBIAS will be performed in 8 EU languages, including the 6 most common mother tongues (EN, DE, ES, FR, IT, PL) as well as 2 minor EU languages (SK, HU). *JOB DESCRIPTION* Ghent University is leading the research activities that focus on the analysis of extremist posts on Facebook and Twitter (related to far-right, far-left movements and jihadism). The scientific collaborator and another researcher will perform a multimodal and multilingual content analysis of the corpus to identify potential discursive strategies used in such extremist/terrorist narratives in order to reinforce specific cognitive biases (e.g., authority bias, declinism bias, bandwagon effect and hostile media effect). To do so, they will first make a review of the literature about: 1) the (multimodal) discursive strategies and markers of far-right, far-left and jihadist extremism on social media; 2) cognitive biases in (social) media communication. Then, they will prepare and perform a manual content analysis of the corpora, based on the literature review. *PROFILE * Requirements: - PhD or Master’s degree in media communication, law, social sciences or a related discipline - Scientific expertise in extremism in (social) media communication - Understanding of content analysis research methods - Excellent communication skills in English – both oral and written. Commands of other languages is an asset. - Living in Belgium or ready to stay in Belgium during the research Candidates are invited to apply by submitting two types of documents by e-mail to Prof. Catherine Bouko (catherine.bouko@ugent.be) by *10 August 2019*, 23:59 (CET): 1) A single pdf-document with : - a letter of application - a CV including the contact details of one person we may contact for a reference) - a copy of the required Master’s degree or PhD degree 2) a personal piece of (scientific) writing in the form of a student paper or publication (e.g., Master thesis or scientific article) in English, demonstrating the applicant’s academic skills. On the basis of these documents, candidates will be selected for an interview (if necessary, interviews can be held via Skype if the applicants live abroad). -- Catherine Bouko Ghent University Faculty of Arts and Philosophy Groot-Brittanniëlaan 45 9000 Gent Belgium Bureau: B2.06 http://research.flw.ugent.be/en/catherine.bouko