University Of Copenhagen (UCPH) 2022 PhD Scholarships At The Department Of Political Science

‘AFAR’ ‘Algorithmic Fairness for Asylum Seekers and Refugees’ investigates the use of new technologies – and particularly, forms of artificial intelligence (AI) – in migration and asylum governance. This includes automation of processes previously done by humans, using simple closed-rule algorithms, as well as more complex machine learning and AI systems. These new technologies are set to radically transform governance, but also risk human rights violations and unfairness, especially in areas such as migration and asylum where the ‘data subjects’ are already disempowered and disenfranchised. This calls for sustained research on what fairness means as a concept, how it can be institutionalized, and how new methods related to data analysis and machine learning can be leveraged in order to support fairness in asylum and migration governance. The PhD will define his or her own research idea and project within the AFAR project. The PhD will be responsible for securing a strong link to migration law within the project and may engage with formal-legal, law-data science, socio-legal approaches, and/or legal philosophical analysis. The PhD project should focus on one or more key areas where these new technologies are being used, (1) access to asylum, (2) refugee status determination or asylum processing, (3) refugee-focused family reunification. We further welcome projects that investigate how AI technologies can support fairness in this empirical domain more broadly.