On behalf of Bianca Cepollaro:
Dear all,
I am advertising a 2-year postdoctoral position in Computer Science, renewable for a further 2 years at the Faculty of Philosophy, UniSR (Milan). The position is part of ACTION – Advancing Counterspeech against Toxic Interactions ONlinehttps://blog.unisr.it/en/counterspeech, a 5-year interdisciplinary research project supported by a €1.3 million grant from the Italian Ministry of University and Research (MUR).
The project brings together philosophers, a social psychologist, and computer scientists to study online counterspeech, i.e. verbal strategies used to respond to toxic and discriminatory language online.
Application deadline: November 9, 2026
Gross annual salary: €37,316 (approximately €2,000 net per month, depending on individual tax circumstances).
Research profile: The successful candidate will study existing practices of toxic language and online counterspeech, create two new corpora based on social media data (one in Italian and one in English), and contribute to their annotation and computational analysis. They will also investigate how counterspeech interventions affect subsequent online exchanges and collaborate with the project team on the development of a new counterspeech model to be tested at a later stage.
We are looking for candidates with a strong background in Natural Language Processing (NLP), computational linguistics, corpus linguistics, social media analysis, or sentiment analysis. The computational work will be carried out independently, in dialogue with the Principal Investigator and a postdoctoral researcher in philosophy of language, and in collaboration with the wider interdisciplinary team.
Beyond their technical expertise, we are looking for someone who is genuinely committed to addressing discrimination and enthusiastic about working in an interdisciplinary research environment. The position offers the opportunity to engage with researchers in philosophy, social psychology, and computer science, and we would be particularly happy to welcome someone interested in continuing with the project for the full four years, subject to renewal of the contract.
Knowledge of Italian is an asset but not a requirement. It would be useful for working with the Italian-language corpus and for contributing to the organisation of seminars and other university activities.
The successful candidate will be expected to participate in the project's activities throughout the duration of the contract, including approximately 2–3 in-person meetings or events per month in Milan, Italy.
If you are interested, please feel free to contact me for an informal discussion, or apply directly by following the instructions in the call:
Official call and application instructionshttps://www.unisr.it/reclutamento-docenti/contratti-ricerca/filosofia
Please feel free to share this announcement with anyone who might be interested.
Best wishes,
Biancamaria Cepollaro
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