Amazing opportunity to work with world class researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute on the topic of automation, routine, desire in online shopping. See details below.
Tesco Labs Doctoral Studentship
The Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford in partnership with Tesco Labs invite applications for a best replica watches three year doctoral studentship which will lead to a DPhil in Information, Communication and the Social Sciences at the University of Oxford beginning in the academic year 2018-19.
Introduction
Applications are invited for a three year DPhil studentship on the future of online shopping supported by Tesco Labs (https://www.tescolabs.com/). The studentship will commence in October 2018. Applications are welcomed from home, EU and overseas students, but a fee differential will be payable for overseas students.
The studentship would be awarded to an OII DPhil student focusing on changing consumption patterns in online shopping. Innovative research proposals from any discipline, using qualitative or quantitative methods, are invited around the following broad themes:
Automation, Routine and Desire
How are people responding to changing levels of automation through smart home and Internet of Things technologies, weekly automated and routinized shopping? What room is there for cultural and social values about food, family, and home to connect with aspirational notions of lifestyle when day-to-day needs are routinized and provided for? How do people express values about food, cooking and domestic life through habits and routines of shopping, both online and off? What role do local shops and commercial spaces play in the expression of aspiration and desire if more basic shopping needs can be automated and fulfilled remotely?
Domestication of online shopping
Online shopping can illuminate the thin and often fuzzy line between what people view as helpful personalization or customization and the decontextualized incursion on their private lives. How might patterns of domestication of practices around privacy management and customization be seen in emerging online shopping patterns? How might the combination of large scale quantitative and rich, in-depth qualitative data about online shopping highlight the social and cultural distinctions people make between their privacy practices and their desire for increasing personalization? How does the domestication and reach of online shopping practices change the experiential elements of consumption for people and what are the cultural and social justifications that they use to describe these changes today?
Online shopping and the Quantified Self
How might the future of consumption change the way we track and monitor ourselves? To what extent might different strategies around online shopping be used for people to ‘nudge’ healthier behaviours. How might people want to use their own online shopping trolley data and to what extent can the efforts of early ‘Quantified Self’ adopters of self-tracking teach us about patterns of self-reflection around daily habits? Can our online and physical shopping environments help support healthier eating and behaviour? What broad questions about our health, life and consumption can be ‘outsourced’ to technological agents while still providing useful and actionable feedback loops for behaviour change? How might the Internet of Things and other emerging devices help to provide new relevant data and better customization within online shopping practices and what social benefits might come from the collective use of data for public health, public outreach, or governmental issues?
Shopping and Social Institutions
To what degree can the connection of data collected at the local level through smart energy meters,tagheuerex health data and urban sensing, be useful for connecting with people’s online shopping data? What social institutional arrangements need to be considered with this rise of datafication? How will local public space reconfigure around online shopping: do we see a return to the row of local shops meeting daily individual shopping needs or can supermarkets find a new role at the conjunction of citizens’ broader online and offline experiences ? What do government health outreach programs look like and civic education programs look like when the supermarket is no more – or at least is not the dependable geographic and physical place where people can be counted on to pass through?
Award details
The award pays all tuition and college fees for home or EU applicants and an annual maintenance grant of £15,000. International students who would be classed as overseas for fee purposes will need to pay the difference between the home/EU fee rate and the overseas rate. The usual University of Oxford eligibility rules apply to these studentships. Please see (http://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/graduate) for more information.
The closing date for applications is 19th January 2018, although we strongly recommend submitting all your materials a week or two early since applications missing any part of the required materials (including letters of reference) cannot be considered. Interviews will be held in either February or March 2018. Further details on the Oxford Internet Institute are available at http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk. Informal inquiries should be made to Laura Maynard, Oxford Internet Institute (teaching@oii.ox.ac.uk).
For further details on how to apply please visit the Oxford Internet Institute website at (https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/study/dphil-in-information-communication-and-the-social-sciences).
You will need to apply for both the programme and this studentship via the main University online graduate application form, and pay an application fee. The application form, all supporting materials required for the programme (including references) and payment must be submitted by the appropriate studentship deadline.
On the application form, in the section headed ‘Departmental Studentship Applications’, you must indicate that you are applying for a studentship and enter the reference code for this studentship 18OII01WEB.
Only applications received before 12:00pm GMT on Friday 19 January 2018 will be considered.