Research Fellow: ESRC Project ‘Accent Bias and Domestic Abuse Victimisation (ABDAVic)

Overview

The Department of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics at the University of Southampton is recruiting a Research Fellow for a fixed-term, 12-month, research-only post on the project Accent Bias and Domestic Abuse Victimisation. The project is funded by an ESRC New Investigator grant and is an experimental sociolinguistics study of possible linguistic discrimination against domestic abuse victims, focusing on bias against classed and racialised accents. Stage One runs matched guise-style experiments with members of the general population, and Stage Two repeats them with trained domestic abuse support workers.

What you will do

The fellow will support the design and delivery of the experiments, including creating auditory stimuli, and the analysis and dissemination of results. The role includes written contributions to conference abstracts, talks and journal articles, and at least one article will have the fellow as lead author. The post can optionally be done remotely, with occasional visits to Southampton and travel to conferences.

Requirements

Applicants should be proficient in survey design and implementation, ideally with Qualtrics, and in R or Python for statistical analysis, including data visualisation and mixed effect regression. Although this is a sociolinguistics project, the post is open to those with PhDs in experimental social research more broadly, including sociology, psychology and political science. Experience in language and ethnicity or language and social class is preferred, and phonetics experience with Praat and Audacity is desirable.

What you get

The salary is 41,064 GBP per year on a full-time contract. The university offers a generous holiday allowance, additional closure days and a flexible working approach.

How to apply

Applicants provide a CV and cover letter.

Key dates

The closing date is 29 October 2026.