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New opportunities – Mediated Trust PhD scholarships

Are you passionate about understanding the intersection of trust, news media, digital platforms, public institutions, and AI, and contributing to current debates on these issues?

The University of Sydney is offering Mediated Trust ARC Laureate PhD Scholarships.

You will be working with a collaborative team of researchers led by ARC Laureate Fellow Professor Terry Flew on the Mediated Trust: ideas, interests, Institutions, Futures project.

The three-year scholarship is part of an Australian Research Council-funded Laureate Fellowship.

What you’ll get:
A stipend equivalent to the University of Sydney Research Training Program (RTP) Stipend rate for up to 3 years (with a possible 6-month extension).

Eligibility:
1. Must be applying for or hold an offer for a full-time PhD in the School of Arts, Communication and English, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Sydney.
2. Research must focus on trust in relation to news media, digital platforms, public institutions, or AI.
3. Hold an Honours degree (first class or second class upper) or equivalent, or a Master’s degree with a significant research component in arts and social sciences.

Applications close on 15 August 2025.

Ready to make an impact? Learn more and apply here.


What is Mediated Trust?

Trust has been described as a feeling of safety and security; an attitude of way of thinking and disposition to action; and a relationship between a person and others. Trust has been described as an invisible institution, whose existence is hard to measure and is more often observed in its absence than in its everyday role.

Communication is central to social trust, as seen with concepts such as mediatisation, misinformation and post-truth. A central premise of the concept of mediated trust is that something has fundamentally changed in the contemporary public sphere linked to the rise of the Internet and digital technologies. The blurring of lines between experienced reality and that which is digitally mediated generate new forms of sociality and social identity, civic engagement, political polarisation and cultural practice. Mediated trust points to the relationship of trust to technology, whether through online news, digital platforms, digital governance or artificial intelligence.

PhD projects in this program will involve in-depth comparative and case study work exploring mediated trust in relation to news, digital platforms, institutions or AI. You will be working with a project team which includes post-doctoral research fellows and data scientists in the Media and Communication discipline Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.

These positions provide the chance to further research capabilities through international travel and the opportunity to tackle a major issue of our time whilst building research capability and working in one of the world’s leading universities. Successful candidates will also be affiliated with the new Centre for Artificial Intelligence, Trust and Governance at The University of Sydney.

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