Research Assistant position

Maynooth University

School of Law & Criminology

Closing Date: 23:30hrs (local Irish time) 2  November 2025

The School of Law and Criminology is seeking a research assistant to work under the supervision of Professor Claire Hamilton, Principal Investigator on the project: ’FEELING POLITICAL: A comparative investigation of the emotional politics of populist discourse on security’. The project is funded by Research Ireland under the COALESCE scheme (Strand 2A). It is led by Maynooth University with partners in the School of Statistics and Computer Science in Trinity College Dublin.

The overall aim of the project is to examine how representations of in/security, emotion, and communicative practices interlink in processes of populist political mobilization, focusing on three case studies in Ireland, France and Poland. The project uses cutting-edge machine-learning techniques from computer science to unpack how populist actors engage with security themes. This will comprise multi-modal analysis of election manifestos, online press releases and leaders’ speeches using software trained in the automatic detection of sentiments in texts and non-verbal communications. These datasets will be complemented by interview data concerning the ‘emotion work’ already carried out by civil society in the area of security.

This is an excellent opportunity for an ambitious researcher aiming to gain multidisciplinary experience in a collegial environment.

Full details and a job description can be found here.