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Applications are invited for a self-funded, 3 year full-time or 6 year part-time PhD project.

The PhD will be based in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and will be supervised by Dr Alessia Tranchese, Dr Matt Round, and Dr Francesca Salvi.

The Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences offers funding to attend conferences and towards consumables, project or training costs (currently £550).

We are looking for strong candidates to work on our enthusiastic PhD project where we aim to study different forms of online misogyny, particularly to disrupt the binary and artificial separation between “extreme” and “mundane” misogyny. Examples of online misogyny that will be considered include (but are not limited to) online pornography, men’s rights forums, and men’s podcasts.

Misogyny will be analysed primarily from a linguistic and discourse perspective. The main part of this project requires a thorough empirical investigation which will be based on large scale collection of online data. For this reason, the selected candidate will be required to have a good knowledge of computational or corpus linguistic analysis, as well as a good understanding of programming languages (e.g., R or Python).

Another part of the project will be dedicated to assessing the impact of online misogyny on young people through focus groups and interviews in schools in the UK. There are growing concerns that the spread of online misogyny are shaping children’s and adolescents’ views of sexual relationships and gender equality, and that current sex education curricula are not appropriate to face the challenges posed by these developments. Recent discussions in the UK about the online safety bill have highlighted the extent of the problem and the difficulties of finding appropriate measures to address it.

Thus, the need for evidence-based approaches to tackle this growing issue has never been greater. This project will generate practical results and impact, with the long-term goal being to use it to inform online safety policies and improve the current sex education provision in UK schools.

Fees and funding

Visit the research subject area page for fees and funding information for this project.

Funding availability: Self-funded PhD students only. 

PhD full-time and part-time courses are eligible for the UK  (UK and EU students only – eligibility criteria apply).

Bench fees

Some PhD projects may include additional fees – known as bench fees – for equipment and other consumables, and these will be added to your standard tuition fee. Speak to the supervisory team during your interview about any additional fees you may have to pay. Please note, bench fees are not eligible for discounts and are non-refundable.

How to apply

We’d encourage you to contact Dr Tranchese (alessia.tranchese@port.ac.uk) to discuss your interest before you apply, quoting the project code.

When applying please quote project code:SLAL4461023