PhD position Social Innovation Initiatives in Rural Areas

Rural place change over time interacts with the rural entrepreneurial agency of rural inhabitants. Rural entrepreneurship often involves social and community components and rural visions and attitudes. This PhD project studies the impact of place on social innovation initiatives in depopulating rural areas, such as community led village shops, community-run services, and other forms of social enterprises. The project aims to identify factors modulating the visions, attitudes and decisions of social entrepreneurial actors, and how they affect and are affected by changing rural places. The results will present “profiles” of entrepreneurs according to their social and professional experiences and their life trajectories across rural and urban places. The results will provide new knowledge about the personal networks of key actors (local and external) in entrepreneurship initiatives and highlight the tangible and intangible resources that nurture rural entrepreneurship over the life-cycle. Findings will also explore how entrepreneurs and their networks evolve as rural places change, providing an original contribution in understanding how actors’ motivations and networks relate to their attachment to rural places. This will make it possible to design recommendations for socially innovative initiatives among rural community organisations and policy-makers thereby contributing to place-based development.

The PhD project is part of the EPHEMERAL research project. EPHEMERAL – Entrepreneurship and Place: How Entrepreneurs Manage Evolving Relationships

Across the Life-cycle – is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Doctoral Network (MSCA-DN) funded under Horizon Europe. The project aims to train a new generation of researchers to advance rural development theory and practice through entrepreneurship. EPHEMERAL explores how entrepreneurs shape rural places over time, considering life-cycle dynamics, evolving local contexts, and structural societal changes. The network includes five European universities and several non-academic partners, offering interdisciplinary supervision and training with a focus on rural entrepreneurship and development.

This position offers a unique opportunity to work at the intersection of social entrepreneurship, geography, and rural development in an international and interdisciplinary research project. As our new PhD student, you will play a central role in:

• Collecting and analysing qualitative and/or quantitative data as part of your study.
• Developing excellent and impactful research published in leading international journals. A PhD thesis consist of 4 first-authored articles at the level of international scientific journals, an introduction and a discussion. The thesis will be written in English.
• Preparing comprehensive analysis reports and contributing to high-impact research publications.
• Participating in dissemination activities to share findings with academic, industry, and public audiences.
• Participating in the EPHEMERAL network. This includes attending and participating in the project meetings and trainings as well as two secondments at the project partners University of Valencia and University of Southern Denmark.