New Job! Postdoctoral Visitor in Metadata & Research Evaluation

[Kean D. Birch]

Apologies for cross-posting (please forward to anyone you think might be interested)

Please forward to anyone you think might find this relevant.

I'm recruiting a Postdoctoral Visitor in Metadata & Research Evaluation to work on a multi-country project, including collaborators in the UK, Germany, France, and Canada. It is funded under the Open Research Area 8 initiative and this position if supported by the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada.

This project is a comparative study of the roles and relevance of open versus commercial digital research information infrastructures (e.g. metrics) in practices of research evaluation and their governance. The project pursues the following core research question: How do open and commercial digital research information infrastructures reorganize research evaluation practices in the field of tension between economy and democracy?

More information about the job, application process, and project are here: https://www.yorku.ca/research/wp-content/uploads/sites/848/2026/02/job-description-Metadata-PDV_2.pdf

Salary: CDN$70,000 (+ benefits)

Location: Toronto, Ontario (can be remote in Ontario)

Length: 18 months

Start date: 1 July 2026

Happy to answer questions.

Thanks,
Kean

Kean Birch

Ontario Research Chair in Science Policy

Professor, Department of Science, Technology & Society

Co-Editor, Science as Culture 

Series Editor, Technoscience & Society Book Series, University of Toronto Press

   

Bluesky | Website | LinkedIn

  

Department of Science, Technology & Society | York University 

4700 Keele Street Toronto ON, Canada M3J 1P3  

 

NEW BOOKs

Kaltenbrunner, W. and Birch, K. (under contract) Trend Economies in Academic Publishing, MIT Press.

Birch,K. (2023) Data Enclaves, Palgrave Macmillan.

Scott, S. et al. (eds) (2023) Business & Society: A Critical Introduction (2nd Edition), Bloomsbury.

NEW ARTICLES

Proskurovska, A. and Birch, K. (online) Tokenization of everything? Implications of blockchain technologies for the governance of financial markets and assets, Finance & Society. [Open Access]

Birch, K. (online) Do artifacts have political economy?, Science, Technology & Human Values. [Open Access]

Komljenovic, J., Williamson, B., Birch, K. and Beiter, K. (online) Assetizing academic content and the emergence of the ‘assetizen’: Education platforms, publisher databases, and AI model training, Higher Education. [Open Access]

Komljenovic, J., Sellar, S. and Birch, K. (2025) Turning universities into data-powered organisations: Dimensions of change, Higher Education 89(5): 1369-1386. [Open Access]

Miroshnichenko, A. and Birch, K. (2025) Constructing digital assets through blockchain technologies? Unpacking the techno-economic configuration of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), Social Studies of Science 55(4): 631-651. [Open Access]

Birch, K., Komljenovic, J. and Sellar, S. (2025) Architectures of assetization: Legacy infrastructures and the configuration of datafication in higher education, New Media + Society 27(4): 1868-1887. [Open Access]

Komljenovic, J. et al. (2025) Digitalised higher education: Key developments, questions, and concerns, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 46(2): 276-292. [Open Access]

Komljenovic, J., Birch, K. and Sellar, S. (2025) Mapping rentiership and assetisation in the digitalisation of education, Learning, Media & Technology 50(1): 1-14. [Open Access]

Birch, K., Komljenovic, J. Sellar, S. and Hansen, M. (2025) Data as asset, data as rent? Rentiership practices in EdTech startups, Learning, Media & Technology 50(1): 15-28. [Open Access]

Birch, K. and Adediji, D. (2025) Undermining competition, undermining markets? The implications of digital personal data for competition policy, Big Data & Society 12(1): 20539517241311584. [Open Access]

[Kean D. Birch via Eurograd]

[Julia Kirch Kirkegaard via Eurograd]

Are you curious about energy transitions and also how they produce valuation struggles? If yes, then this 2-year Postdoc position might be for you.

Application deadline is April 15: https://lnkd.in/e3Ur_hkc

The postdoc will be part of my European Research Council (ERC) -funded project, ‘Good-by-Devicing – probing how value comes to matter in the energy transition: the case of energy islands’, working together with my good colleagues in the project, as well as with other great scholars at the Division of Technology and Business Studies at DTU MAN (Department of Technology, Management, and Economics).

Apologies for cross-posting (please apply and/or forward to anyone you think might be interested)

 

All best wishes,

Julia Kirch Kirkegaard

Julia Kirch Kirkegaard Professor, PhD Department of Technology, Management and Economics (DTU MAN) Science and Technology Studies, ju...@dtu.dk Mob. +45 93 51 14 31, +45 26 36 74 08 Lyngby Campus, Akademivej 424, 2nd floor, office 226, 2800 Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark   New publications out: Frantzen, D. N., & Kirkegaard, J. K. (2026). Critique by economization: a spatial struggle between surfers and a ‘good economy.’ Journal of Cultural Economy, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2025.2589823 Julia Kirch Kirkegaard, Alan Irwin, and Xuan Li (2025): Making the Global Local: The Case of Chinese Research and Innovation Evaluation Systems. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 1-36. https://doi.org/10.1177/01622439251329966 ERC project: https://www.good-by-devicing.org/ DFF-funded Sapere Aude project: https://www.expertiseofexpectations.org/