Didier Ruedin

8 March 2023

100 PhDs for Africa programme: 2nd call for proposals

Excellence in Africa – 100 PhDs for Africa programme: The second call for proposals is open

The EXAF Centre is launching the second call for proposals of the “100 PhDs for Africa Programme”, as part of the Excellence in Africa initiative, jointly launched by UM6P (the Mohammed VI Polytechnic University in Morocco) and by EPFL (the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne).

The 100 PhDs for Africa programme will give to science and engineering graduates the opportunity to pursue a PhD at an African higher education institution. The PhD students benefiting from this programme will be jointly supervised by a professor of an African institution and by an EPFL professor. They will conduct their doctoral studies and their thesis research at their institution in Africa, and they will spend short periods of time at EPFL and at UM6P (summer and spring schools, workshops, conferences).

The first call for proposals is now open, with a deadline for applications set for 18 April 2023 (17:00 UTC+2). Talented master graduates who have the endorsement of a professor at an African higher education institution for PhD supervision are very welcome to apply.

We kindly invite you to disseminate this information on your website and, if possible, amongst your network of contacts. You will find here the application guidelines. Please feel free to contact us with any further questions (exaf@epfl.ch).

more information about the programme : link

7 March 2023

Quarto HTML themes gallery

Quarto comes with several HTML themes built in. They are documented, but coming from the Bootswatch project, the existing documentation doesn’t give a good impression of what each theme looks like when used for an article.

Click images for a larger version.

7 March 202315 March 2023

Join us! 100% Postdoc, 24 months

We’re hiring a postdoc to research human migration and mobility.

You have a PhD in migration, sociology, demography, economics, public health, or similar (max. 5 years since PhD). You have quantitative skills (p.ex. causal inference, survey experiments, big data, text-as-data), and you’re hungry to develop your own research.

Excellent French and English needed.

Job advert, deadline 30 April 2023

6 March 2023

Crises do not necessarily increase discrimination

Using the current pandemic as an example, we show that social and economic crises do not necessarily translate into increased levels of ethnic discrimination. We repeated a field experiment in the housing market, and find no clear evidence of increased discrimination against the most important immigrant groups in Switzerland.

How does this fit with accounts of increased levels of hate speech, especially at the beginning of the pandemic? We think it is important to differentiate between “cheap” behaviour that does not cost the perpetrator much (hate speech, exclusionary attitudes) and “costly” behaviour where the perpetrators take a risk (e.g. risk of not rending out an apartment, risk of not hiring the best candidate). Moreover, we think it is important to recognize that crises not only affect boundary making and exclusion (that’s what social theory tells us), but also increase economic uncertainty — a change that affects how (economic) actors behave.

Auer, Daniel, Didier Ruedin, and Eva Van Belle. 2023. ‘No Sign of Increased Ethnic Discrimination during a Crisis: Evidence from the Covid-19 Pandemic’. Socio-Economic Review. DOI: 10.1093/ser/mwac069

20 February 2023

NCCR on the move: visiting fellows 2023

To enhance international exchange and cooperation, the nccr – on the move offers Visiting Fellowships for senior and junior researchers from abroad, who wish to collaborate with our network for a duration of two to three months.

Deadline for applications: 31 March 2023.

Further information can be found here.