Les reproducimos a continuación una propuesta de trabajo como profesor en Tecnologí­a y Desarrollo Internacional en la Universidad de Waningen.

JOB ADVERT

Job Reference: SSG-KTI-0001
Job Title: Personal Professor of Technology and International Development (Tenure Track)
Contact Email

We are looking for

Within the chair group Knowledge, Technology and Innovation there is a vacancy for a personal professor in the field of Technology and International Development. The areas of work will be: technology and societal transformation, development in the global south, and society-technology-science interaction in development processes. The Knowledge, Technology and Innovation group is part of the Section Communication, Technology and Philosophy that has a firm commitment to doing integrative research in collaboration with life scientists.

The professor is expected to continue and expand the excellent performance of the group with a leadership style that is enabling and stimulating for researchers, PhD candidates and undergraduate students. S/he develops innovative research in close cooperation with the current staff. S/he enables research projects that transcend individual research lines and stimulates initiatives that lead to excellent publications. S/he has experience in interdisciplinary research.

We ask

As a Personal Professor you are an ambitious and enthusiastic scientist and a team player, devoted to research and education in the field of Technology and International Development.

This will require:

• expert knowledge on the role of technology in international development, including the socio-political dynamics involved in the production, exchange, integration and use of scientific and other knowledgerelated to agricultural production and environmental change, food security, poverty, health hazards, inequality, health promotion, environmental degradation, climate change, conflict and scarcity of resources;
• long-term experience in developing countries/the global south;
• experience in supervising PhD students (often with a combined beta-gamma background), working in the fields of critical development studies, political ecology, and social agronomy;
• experience in working in interdisciplinary research networks (beta-gamma, as well as within the social sciences).

Besides the above mentioned we expect:

• profound knowledge of the research field;
• an ambition to build a strong research and teaching centre of international standing;
• a track record of high-quality research and publications that is proportionate to his/her length of  research experience;
• leadership and management qualities;
• capacity to acquire research funds from external sources;
• pleasant and effective social and interpersonal skills;
• ability to coordinate, stimulate, facilitate and initiate;
• a capacity to present research results to a wider public;
• capacity and contacts to further strengthen and enlarge the group’s international network.

We offer

We offer a personal professorship. Within Wageningen University a personal professorship is the outcome of challenging career trajectory, Tenure Track.

We are looking for high potentials who can excel in education and research. We offer you a  emporary contract for five years for 38 hours per week, which can lead to a permanent employment contract. A part-time position of 0.8 fte is negotiable.

Gross salary: from € 68.440 to € 85.250 per year, based on full time employment and dependent on expertise and experience.

For further information about working and Tenure Track at Wageningen UR, take a look at
http://www.wageningenur.nl/en/Jobs.htm.

A more detailed profile can be obtained from vera.mentzel@wur.nl.

Additional enquiries should be addressed to cees.leeuwis@wur.nl or can be obtained from +31 317 484310.

Please do not send you application via e-mail.

HR Excellence in Research
In June 2012 the European Commission conferred an “HR Excellence in Research” award to Wageningen UR, in recognition of its follow-up efforts of the The European Charter for Researchers and The Code of Conduct for the Recruitment of Researchers (Charter and Code).

We are

Wageningen University & Research centre aims to deliver a substantial contribution to the quality of life. That’s our focus – each and every day. Within our domain, healthy food and living environment, we search for answers to issues affecting society – such as sustainable food production, climate change and alternative energy. Of course, we don’t do this alone. Every day, 6,500 people work on ‘the quality of life’, turning ideas into reality, on a global scale.

Could you be one of these people? We give you the space you need.

Acquisition regarding this vacancy is not appreciated.

TECHNOLOGY AND INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT – DESCRIPTION OF THE FIELD

The Sub-department Communication, Technology and Philosophy – Centre for Integrative
Development (CTP-CID) is a collaborative centre in which three groups participate: the Knowledge, Technology and Innovation group, the Strategic Communication group and the Philosophy group. A uniting ambition of the new Sub-department is to combine a better understanding of the relations between the life sciences and societal change with making practical contributions to enhancing the interaction between science and society. The groups in CTP-CID do not only work within their own discipline, but have a firm commitment to doing integrative research in collaboration with life scientists.

Within the Knowledge, Technology and Innovation group, many faculty and PhD candidates
investigate the interaction between technology, society and international development.
The central focus is on technology as a process of making, including all forms of tool-use by
humans and how this relates to wider processes of transformation in societies. Of special
interest are issues of poverty, food security, social justice, and adaptation to climatic and
environmental change. Social science is the group’s home but the faculty works closely
together with colleagues of technical groups, contributing to the shared objectives for
technical improvement. The field has emerged out of development studies and engages in
debates about the shifting meanings of the notion of ‘development’ as a contentious issue
and studies the changing relationships in an international context involving networks of
differentiated actors and issues of inequality and social justice. In the field Technology and
International Development the following elements are important:

Scientific focus: technology and societal transformation o The core issue is how social and material realities affect the dynamics of agrarian change, regional variety, and international dimensions of agro-food regimes. Attention is given to institutional thinking, path dependencies and political action. International standards and global trade networks are as important in this process as local labour conditions or civil society organisations. The scientific ambition is to
develop comparative and integrative theoretical approaches to technology-in-use in different situations and conditions and at different levels (developing countries and other countries, from local to international level). Research draws upon, amongst others, conceptual approaches associated with political ecology, science and technology studies, anthropology and development studies.

Methodology development: technography and interdisciplinarity o Making technology-society interaction researchable through developing interdisciplinary, integrative and comparative methodologies is a cornerstone of this research. The approach implies i) contributing to the analysis of social-technical configurations and design practices with beta scientists and ii) cutting across different disciplines within the social sciences, such as sociology, political geography,
anthropology, political science and other relevant fields. A close link to practice
through international networks is crucial. The group has a strong experience in
combining ethnography, historical analysis, participatory action research, process
analysis and critical realist thinking about methodology.

Societal relevance: technology as cause or cure
o Many contemporary societal problems involve technology, whether as cause or cure.
Making technology work requires careful (re)configuration with processes of social
change. The research responds to a clear demand from, among others, national
governments and donor organisations, programmes guided by (international) public
research institutes, social movements, and partnerships among businesses and civil
society groups. It aims to explore alternative pathways for engaging social and
technological change and to forge symmetrical combinations of social science and
natural science in processes of agrarian development.

The embedding of the field Technology and International Development
Technology and International Development is one of the fields to be addressed by the new
Knowledge, Technology and Innovation group. This new group is created out of two groups
with an established academic record: the Technology and Agrarian Development group and
the Communication and Innovation Studies group. The Knowledge, Technology and
Innovation group plays an active role in the Wageningen School of Social Sciences. There is
a well-established network of international contacts in universities, research institutes, civil
society organisations. The group has a large network of MSc and PhD alumni.

The field TECHNOLOGY AND INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT is considered to be internationally
cutting edge in its combination of researching and teaching on:
ï‚· relationships between the natural-technical and the social-institutional (requires
expertise in science- and technology studies or other disciplines that study
technology/nature – society interaction)
ï‚· relationships between more- and less developed parts of the world, dynamics of
societal transformation and agrarian change (requires expertise in development
studies and agrarian political economy)
ï‚· integrative methodologies capable of unpacking the interactions between the
domains (requires expertise in methodologies that foster interdisciplinary
approaches)

An example of a recent collective activity on methodology is the special issue of NJAS-
Wageningen Journal of Life Sciences (57(2011):3-4) on Technography and Interdisciplinarity:
Performance, Practices and Experiments.

About 45 PhD candidates are currently working in the field Technology and International
Development. Most candidates are international students (currently 2 are Dutch). The
majority of these candidates is being jointly supervised by internal faculty and supervisors
from other groups (many of them from the natural sciences). The new professor is
supposed to act as ‘promotor’ of a substantial number of the current candidates, to
facilitate new project applications by faculty members, to develop new research
programmes that include PhD projects, and to make theoretical contributions to PhD
training and research master education.