The ERC Starting Grant project GIVE RIGHTS is currently recruiting a PhD student. Deadline for application is 18 January 2026.
About the GIVE RIGHTS ERC Staring Grant project
The project is funded through an ERC Starting Grant. It focusses on how the rights claims of undocumented migrants and the collective contestations of welfare professionals are related as migration control is increasingly deputized across different societal actors. Across Europe, welfare professionals have resisted proposals that they should have a duty to report undocumented migrants to the police. This resistance has been pivotal for protecting migrants’ rights. Consequently, GIVE RIGHTS will develop new conceptual tools for an interdisciplinary understanding of undocumented migrants’ rights as rooted in an interplay between migrants’ rights-claims and welfare professionals’ attitudes, practices, and collective contestations – highlighting the underexamined relational character of rights. The project investigates the politics of undocumented migrants’ rights as an interplay between different actors with converging interests: Undocumented migrants want access to their human rights – in Hannah Arendt’s words they want to have a “right to have rights” – and welfare professionals do not want to act as extended border guards but have a “right to give rights”. The project compares experiences in Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands and the UK where the protection of undocumented migrants’ access to rights are, or have recently been, undergoing intense negotiations. It will combine survey data with policy mapping, qualitative media analysis, participant observation, focus groups and expert interviews. In this way GIVE RIGHTS aims to provide a new research agenda for theoretical and political debates on the future of human rights in Europe.
About the PhD position
The doctoral student will be based in Malmö but is expected to conduct research in the Netherlands for a limited time among welfare professionals and organizations about their approach to undocumented migrants’ rights. The doctoral student is also expected to collaborate with the other researchers in the GIVE RIGHTS project and contribute to the fulfilment of the project’s overall aims. This includes conducting a media study of Dutch news outlets and supporting colleagues in the distribution of a survey in the Netherlands.
More details here.