PhD opportunity in lovely Sweden

If you have a master's degree and an interest in new media, surveillance and user labour, you really should apply for this PhD at Uppsala University in Sweden. It's delivered in English, and would be an amazing opportunity.

Uppsala University hereby declares the following position to be open
for application:
PhD position in Media and Communication Studies
at the Department of Informatics and Media as of January 1st, 2011.
The candidate is supposed to participate in the department’s ongoing research in the field of web 2.0/social media/social networking sites & economic online surveillance/Internet prosumer labour. Therefore applicants with a solid background in the combination of the following areas are solicited to apply: critical media and communication studies, Critical Theory, critical political economy, critical political economy of media, ICTs and communication; Internet studies, surveillance and privacy studies, critical advertising and consumer culture studies.
Qualifications: master’s degree (candidates with any suited disciplinary and interdisciplinary background are welcome to apply), excellent command of written and spoken English. 

I'm tempted to apply for it myself…

Let's all move to Sweden…

(or the Netherlands): Sweden offers FREE higher education for home and international students, and in a few years' time, most Swedish degrees will be in English. The down side is the loss of cultural autonomy - it's important that smaller languages keep going in all spheres.

The up side is that they'll be needing suave, outgoing lecturers keen to move to sophisticated societies. Time to polish the CV, methinks.

By the way, students: we have links with many European universities and funding to send you there for a year - it's a brilliant experience, and an extra year in university might be a good option at the moment - talk to your tutor or subject leader.

(from this Guardian article).

It's Pay Day!

So I can sack work off and start buying books and music!

After praising Sweden to the skies yesterday, apparently it's all gone tits up, to use a terrible phrase from the 90s.

Right. Time for coffee with Neal, who swam alone today because I overslept for the first time since I finished my PhD. Alan's told us all about the Nightingales at Glastonbury - hundreds of people lapping up their arty noise rock. Another triumph!

We are a charitable lot

In the middle of another story, here's an astonishing statistic, if true:

The number of students prevented by their parents from attending sex education classes increased during the Iraq war, when many Muslim families immigrated to Sweden. The Scandinavian country, with 10 million inhabitants, granted full refugee status to 24,799 Iraqis between 2003 and 2007, compared with 260 by Britain.

How astonishingly mean-spirited. The UK invades a country on a false pretext, having previously armed and encouraged its dictator, wreaking havoc and a concomitant civil war, then found room to accept only 260 individuals, despite the immense hardship. Meanwhile a much smaller country with no global pretensions and no responsibility for the war opens its doors to a much greater proportion of refugees.

Förlåt, Sweden!