Expression of Interest

Brief description of the institution:

The UPV/EHU (www.ehu.es) is a teaching and research institution officially founded in 1985. It is the leading research institution in the Basque country, placing it among the world’s 500 top universities, according to Shanghai Ranking. The university employs over 7.000 people throughout 20 centers distributed in its three campuses with over 45,000 undergraduate and postgraduate students.
The UPV/EHU gathers 290 research groups with a scientific output of over 35 articles per week in journals in the first quartile and 45% of the publications in competitive journals (WoS and Scopus) are the result of international collaboration.
Since the first Research Framework Programmes, the UPV/EHU has been very active and has participated in over 40 projects from the Sixth Framework Programme (FP6). With regard to the FP7, the UPV/EHU has participated in 103 projects and has been the beneficiary of seven ERC Grants and 34 Marie Curie projects.
Up to April 2018, the UPV/EHU is the beneficiary of twenty two MSC-IF (6 GF and 16 EF) and eighteen collaborative MSC actions (9 ITN and 9 RISE), seven of them coordinated by the UPV/EHU. Overall, 75 projects were granted in H2020, including five ERC Grants.

Brief description of the Centre/Research Group (including URL if applicable):

The IAS-Research Centre for Life, Mind and Society (http://www.ias-research.net/) is an interdisciplinary research group affiliated to the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science at the UPV/EHU. It is located in San Sebastián, Spain. Accumulating almost three decades of research experience, the centre aims at understanding biological, cognitive, and social systems as complex organizations from a naturalistic perspective in ongoing dialogue with phenomenological research. Researchers adopt an interdisciplinary approach combining philosophical analysis, theoretical advances, and modelling efforts. Areas of expertise include: philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, philosophy of language, embodied cognition, enaction, social cognition, phenomenology, ecological psychology, dynamical systems theory, complex systems, artificial life, artificial intelligence, computational neuroscience, theoretical biology, biological and cognitive simulation modelling, and bio-ethics.

IAS-Research has hosted and trained dozens of researchers at the doctoral and postdoctoral levels, including Marie Curie Fellows and ITNs. Senior members of the group have extensive expertise in research leadership and training attracting funding at the international, European, national, and regional levels. The centre hosts a vibrant community of young researchers and active international links for research collaboration. Together, these conditions and resources help sustain an ambitious vision that aims at innovating our understanding of life, mind, and society.

Project description:

Our research is concerned with the current and outstanding questions of embodied approaches to the mind, with a focus on the development of enactive theories of the biological, sensorimotor, intersubjective, and linguistic dimensions of embodiment. These research lines involve a multidisciplinary team in our Centre led by Ezequiel Di Paolo and Hanne De Jaegher, who have worked on enaction and its applications for almost two decades.

The enactive approach to mind, life, and society is one of the most active strands of embodied cognition research, spanning a growing range of topics and a large international community. Application of enactive ideas go beyond cognitive science and philosophy and have been found useful in education science, sports psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy, music science, anthropology, and the arts.

We welcome projects aimed at exploring the frontiers and challenges of enactive theory. In particular, our current interests include (but are not limited to):

• Intersubjective epistemology/epistemology of engagement
• Love and intimacy (incl. feminist theory)
• The phenomenology of interacting / of making sense together
• Conflict and interactional breakdown
• Applications of participatory sense-making in therapy, education, consulting, care, the arts
• Autistic embodiment and sense-making, autistic language (we welcome expressions of interest by people with autism/autistic people)
• Combining quantitative and phenomenological methods to study interactive experience
• Ethical and political implications of participatory sense-making

Strong backgrounds in cognitive science, philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, political science, ethics, education, feminist theory, or cultural studies, will be suitable to engage in these or similar lines of work.

Applications

Please, contact Dr De Jaegher (hanneke.dejaegher@ehu.eus) as soon as possible in order to coordinate the preparation of the proposal.

Please, include the following information:

- A statement of motivation and interests

- CV of the applicant

Spanish NCPs offer to revise proposals in an advanced stage until 15th July 2018. It would be convenient to make use of this option, so please, try to get in touch well before this date.