Postdoctoral position in computational social science for studying and combating everyday misogyny in visual online cultures

Are you interested in working at the intersection of computational and social sciences, with the support of competent and friendly colleagues in an international environment? Are you looking for an employer that invests in sustainable employeeship and offers safe, favourable working conditions? We welcome you to apply for a postdoctoral position at Uppsala University.

The Department of Information Technology holds a leading position in both research and education at all levels. We are currently Uppsala University's third largest department, have around 350 employees, including 120 teachers and 120 PhD students. Approximately 5,000 undergraduate students take one or more courses at the department each year. You can find more information about us on the Department of Information Technology website.

The work will be performed at the Information Laboratory (InfoLab), an interdisciplinary research group where we do basic and applied research on the extraction of knowledge from social data.

The position is part of EU HORIZON project FEMVision – Fighting Everyday Misogyny in Visual Online Cultures, which addresses online misogyny through its visual dimension, focusing on mainstream digital environments frequented by young Europeans (18–30). The project addresses the urgency of countering misogyny as a “gateway” to radicalisation, polarisation, and hate speech, while reinforcing democratic resilience and promoting inclusive digital spaces for women, girls, and gender-diverse individuals. In doing so, FEMVision bridges technological innovation and critical reflection, turning AI into a resource that empowers educators, youth workers, policymakers, and civil society to prevent a pervasive form of digital hate. The consortium brings together leading universities and organisations from Italy, Denmark, Estonia, Sweden, Germany, Slovenia, and the Netherlands, ensuring a strong interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approach.

Duties
The postdoc will lead the following activities:

• Development of a classifier for online visual misogyny.
• Application of the classifier to social media data (empirical mapping).
• Development of a chatbot, adding a conversational layer to the classifier, enabling collaborative discussion of visual material.

In addition, the postdoc will contribute to the following activities:

• Data Donation.
• Construction of a curated dataset.
• Data access, collection, and availability.
• Testing of the classifier.
• Analysis of online reactions.
• Integration of the classifier and chatbot with other project activities.

Duties include 80% research and 20% teaching or other departmental duties.

Requirements
PhD degree in computer science, computational social science, or related discipline, or a foreign degree equivalent to a PhD degree in computer science, computational social science, or related discipline. The degree needs to be obtained by the time of the decision of employment. Priority will be given to applicants who have completed their degree no more than three years before the deadline for applications.  Due to special circumstances, the degree may have been obtained earlier. The three-year period can be extended due to circumstances such as sick leave, parental leave, duties in labour unions, etc.

Other requirements are: experience working with social data, proficiency in training machine learning and AI models for data analysis, excellent linguistic competences, excellent programming skills.

Additional qualifications
Experience in social media data collection and analysis, experience in interdisciplinary research, experience in computational image analysis, experience using LLMs for data analysis.

About the employment
The employment is a temporary position of 3 years, according to central collective agreement. Full time position. Starting date 1 October 2026 or as agreed. Placement: Uppsala.

For further information about the position, please contact: Prof. Matteo Magnani, +46 18 471 40 21, Email: matteo.magnani@it.uu.se

In this recruitment we have replaced the cover letter with questions that you are asked to answer when making your application. The answers will be used as a part of the selection process. Please also include a CV and a list of publications.

Please submit your application by 15 July 2026, UFV-PA 2026/1969.

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