School of Social and Political Science

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Applications for the 3 PhD scholarships close at 23:59 GMT on Thursday 11th December 2025. Late applications cannot be accepted.

Following a European Advanced Grant Award funded by UKRI to Professor Andrew Hoskins for his project: WARSHARE: The New War Front: Digital Participation in War, he is now recruiting a research team, including three PhD scholarships to begin in September 2026. The students appointed in these scholarship positions will collaborate and contribute as members of the research team on this project. 

This project involves working with participants traumatised by experiences of war. It also explores the depiction of acts of violence and war, including messages, images, and videos that reference or show violent acts and human injury and death. Careful and expert consideration of the potential impact of such exposure to project participants and researchers and mitigating measures are central components of the project. However, applicants should be aware of the nature of some of this research and the potential risks involved in its undertaking. All research conducted as part of this project is subject to ethical approval by the School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh.

These PhD scholarship positions are based in Sociology although all are highly interdisciplinary and will involve co-supervision by colleagues drawn from other subject areas as required (e.g., Politics and IR, Computing, and Law).

Scholarship holders will be expected to act as ambassadors for the wider project, disseminating and promoting project work and findings, and undertaking national and international travel to participate in workshops and conferences.

Project details

The battle over representations and perceptions of war is transformed in an era of billions of images, videos and other digital content of war being produced, shared, edited, liked, linked, fabricated and deleted on smartphones, social media platforms and messaging apps. 

War in the twenty-first century is participative. People can record and document war, and unwittingly and deliberately transmit data points that can generate targets on the battlefield. Smart devices are both a way to represent war and a node in its practice.

This project will produce new interdisciplinary understanding of how and why digital participation is transforming how individuals and societies (including militaries and states) fight, experience, and understand (perceive, explain, and de/legitimise) warfare. 

It will illuminate how smart devices, apps and platforms enable a wide range of actors – militaries, states, journalists, NGOs, private companies, soldiers, citizens, victims – to participate in warfare in an immediate and ongoing fashion.

At the same time, this project engages the revolution in machine-learning and AI methods which enable mining and measuring of online behaviour at scale, and the illumination of multiple modes of communication (messages, images, video, memes and emojiis) that together shape participation and meaning in warfare. 

In experimenting with AI and machine learning methods, it will break new interdisciplinary ground (social and computing science, art, visual, media and communication studies) to test what kinds of knowledge about twenty-first century participative war (how it is fought, experienced, contested, legitimized, and remembered, for multiple actors) can be acquired and used.

It takes the hybrid messenger service/social media platform of Telegram as its principal case study, an unbounded ‘new war front’, central to the waging and experiencing of the 2022- Russian war against Ukraine.

Scholarship 1: Participative war, form and content

What does twenty-first century war in digital media look like? 

This research will identify, map and interrogate the multimodal content (messages, images and video) used in twenty-first century participative war on social media.

This student will draw upon their computing science expertise, applying AI-driven text, image and video mining methods, to identify and track image and video posts on Telegram, and other social media platforms as appropriate, defined as salient by their reference to the 2022- war between Russia and Ukraine.

Key objectives:

1. Reveal how multimodal content constitutes ‘participative war’ in social media – what war looks like and how particularly visual content is used as commentaries on and as weapons of warfare.
2. Using experimental machine learning work, find and classify and compare messages and images (photos, videos, memes) of participative war to identify the key features of Telegram as an emergent media ecology of war.
3. Explore the affective quality of Telegram war content, including the use of ‘exceptional’ images defining of the platform in that these they would contravene (and thus are excluded by) the rules and regulatory visual regimes of most mainstream news media and social media platforms, in their depiction of human suffering and death.

Scholarship 2: Actors in the New Media/War Ecology

This research will identify the principal actors and their motivations for, and expectations about engaging in, twenty-first century participative war in Ukraine through smartphones and social media.

This student will employ a qualitative approach to identify the key actors participating in war on Telegram. They will undertake semi-structured interviews and related ethnographic work, and employ visual elicitation techniques using cluster representations, messages, images and videos to engage participants, i.e., through discussions and questions anchored to a particular image, video, channel, set of images, and focused around key image genres, posting motivations and events in the war.

Key objectives:

1. Identify and classify the dominant actors (militaries, states, citizens) who post, emoji, edit, share, show and hide messages, images and videos of war on Telegram.
2. Map and illuminate the smartphone practices of the dominant actors sharing images, and the motivations, expectations and responses of participants engaging with the war through smartphones and on Telegram.
3. Explore attitudes to and uses of images of war often treated as exceptional, as recorded and shared on smartphones and on Telegram (i.e., approaches to censoring or sanitising, versus the use of these images as weapons and as psychological warfare).

Scholarship 3: Remembering and forgetting through digital trajectories of war

How does participative warfare shape memory and accountability?

This research will track and show what and how digital images of twenty-first century war are collected, stored, archived, erased, lost, remembered and forgotten. 

Key objectives:

1. Identify which key current images of war and past images of war (used as templates- types, numbers, proportion) decline or disappear over time in a sample of channels in Telegram, to the 2022- Russian-Ukrainian war.
2. Identify who and how is using, storing, archiving digital images of war, and to what ends.
3. Interrogate the participative production, distribution and capture of messages, images and videos at new scale, to explore potential pathways to legal action and accountability.

It comprises three case studies:

Case study 1: Individual remembering and forgetting: This case study employs a typical experimental psychology approach to test and retest for individual retention of memory of information about and experiences of digitally mediated war. 

Case study 2: Social and cultural remembering and forgetting: This case study will track the calls for and uses of social and cultural remembering emerging from participative war in Ukraine and Russia, tracking a ‘radicalisation of memory’ (Hoskins) to probe how social media platforms disrupt the longstanding relationship between event, media, archive, meaning and memory. It will probe the uses and abuses of memorial images as drawn from participant forms of production (including Telegram and other social media platforms).

Case study 3: Digital memory and law: Case study 3 will track how a battle over a ‘new memory’ (Hoskins) of this war is embedded in the cultures and processes of the collection, archiving, memorialising and analysis of digital and open-source information.

This work also involves the organizing and undertaking of semi-structured interviews and related ethnographic work.

Award value

The scholarship funding is for 4 years per award. The awardees will commence the full-time PhD Sociology programme in September 2026. 

Scholarships 1 and 2 are funded by the School of Social and Political Science where the following disclaimer applies: The University reserves the right, in its sole discretion, to amend or withdraw any of the advertised scholarships, without notice.

Scholarship 3 is funded by the UKRI research grant and the above disclaimer does not apply.

The awards include:

• an annual maintenance grant/stipend at the UKRI rate (£20,780 in 2025/26 for reference)
• tuition fee cover for the Home fee rate. You can work out your fee status here

Eligibility

The full-time PhD Sociology programme start date must be no later than September 2026. 

Only applicants with Home/UK Fee status are eligible to apply for this scholarship. You can work out your fee status here.

Applicants must ideally meet the following additional eligibility criteria for this award:

Scholarship 1: Participative war, form and content

• A background in computing science, and especially in AI-driven text, image and video mining method work
• High proficiency in Ukrainian and Russian language

Scholarship 2: Actors in the New Media/War Ecology 

• High proficiency in Ukrainian and Russian language
• Experience in qualitative research methods (interviews)

Scholarship 3: Remembering and forgetting through digital trajectories of war

• A background in digital memory studies
• Experience in qualitative research methods (interviews)

Application process

Applicants must specify which one scholarship they are applying for and send the following documents via email to Myriam Bousbia  (myriam.bousbia@ed.ac.uk) no later than 11 December 2025.

• A university studies transcript, showing courses/modules taken and marks for individual courses and for a dissertation
• A CV of no more than three pages
• Two references from academic staff who have direct experience of your work, including (if possible) an Undergraduate or Postgraduate dissertation supervisor
• A single authored academic writing sample of around 3,000 words (e.g. a coursework essay or dissertation chapter)
• A maximum one page Personal Statement covering:

1. Your interest in this PhD project
2. Your relevant experience and training  
3. How you would want to develop the project, including any particular issues and questions you would want to explore
4. Your longer-term career plans, and how this project will help you to progress them, including any training that you would hope to receive

The scholarship awards are subject to the candidate successfully securing admission to the full-time PhD Sociology programme within the School of Social and Political Science. The successful scholarship applicants will be invited to apply for admission to the PhD programme after they are selected for funding.

Selection, assessment and results 

The selection process comprises of two stages:

Stage 1: The application documents must be sent to Myriam Bousbia by 11 December 2025. Applications will be reviewed (using the assessment criteria below) by a panel comprising of Professor Andrew Hoskins and Professor Kate Wright.

Stage 2: Shortlisted candidates will be invited to an interview (which may be in-person or online). Candidates will be sent interview questions and details of a presentation task in advance of the interview. Application documents and interviews will be assessed against the eligibility criteria, and ability to carry out the role tasks as described above. In addition, we will be looking at the following criteria:

• Applicant capabilities and academic achievements, including their preparedness and potential to undertake and complete a PhD, and their expected contribution to a positive PhD community and the project team
• Understanding of the research topic and independent ideas for research; demonstration of interest in the topic and ability to develop a detailed research proposal if successful; fit and complementarity with the project’s aims and work

Interview date: Expected to be in January 2026 and may be held online. 

Shortlisted candidates are expected to be advised of the outcome in February 2026.

Sociology in the School of Social and Political Science

These scholarships will be based in one of the UK’s leading Sociology departments, at the University of Edinburgh, with key strengths in Digital Sociology, culture and methods.  

Sociology is located in the School of Social and Political Science (SPS), one of the largest and most successful schools of social science in the UK, with global reach and local and global impact.  

The scholarships are available following the appointment of Professor Andrew Hoskins to a Personal Chair in AI, Memory and War, at Edinburgh in January 2025, working on his ERC awarded/UKRI funded project WARSHARE.

Contact details

For queries about the project and scholarships, please contact the Principal Investigator and Supervisor, Professor Andrew Hoskins (andrew.hoskins@ed.ac.uk)

For queries about the application process, please contact Toni Jenkins (pgresearch.sps@ed.ac.uk).