Deadline 7th of Juni 2026
As a PhD candidate, you will work within the NWA-ORC program: “Traumascapes: Valuing, Negotiating and Sharing Sites of Trauma, Pain and Loss”. Within this program, you will develop and apply mixed methods to identify, value, and visualize the polyphony and diverse interpretations of trauma landscapes, within the broader perspective of long-term spatial transformation.
“Traumascapes are a distinctive category of places transformed physically and psychically by suffering, part of a scar tissue that stretches across the world,” wrote Australian cultural historian Maria Tumarkin in 2005. These landscapes are characterized by events that have profoundly altered their meaning and experience. East Groningen serves as the central case study in this PhD research. Due to gas extraction, ecological damage, and safety issues, this area has developed into a 20th-century trauma landscape, just like Limburg. The spatial and social structures have been shaped by the history of energy exploitation, with far-reaching consequences for this province, which also possesses a rich historical past, ecosystems, and local communities. You work at the intersection of research and design, combining landscape architectural methods with ethnographic cartography, biographical analyses, and other data collection through action research in participatory landscape design. In an interdisciplinary and international context, you investigate how design can contribute to dialogue, processing, and future-oriented development of trauma landscapes.