Do you want to see the rights of temporary workers protected and improved? Do you find it important that PhDs have say in our University policy? Vote for Utrecht PhD Party in the elections for the University Council.

From April 6-8 2021, go to uu.nl/vote and vote!

We are proud to present our new team of candidates. Tim de Winkel and Irene Alcubilla Throughton from the department of media and culture studies lead the list for the alpha/gamma district. Besides his role in UPP, Tim works on forming a union for PhD candidates (called 0.7). Tim and Irene are followed by Esmee Veenstra, PhD candidate in Social Sciences. Maranke Wieringa from the Humanities Faculty is a familiar face for UPP, they were a candidate in 2019 as well. Maranke joins again as fourth candidate. Current council member Lieke Schrijvers symbolically closes the list.

For the Beta district we have seven candidates: Romy Riemersma is the list leader, followed by Ellen Deelen, Jelmer Koorn and Max van Haastrecht. Ellen is the only candidate from the Faculty of Veterinary Science, the other six are researchers in the Faculty of Science. All first four candidates have plenty experience in PhD representation via their role as representative and board members of Utrecht’s PhD organisation PROUT. Fifth on the list is Linge Li, who is a bursary PhD candidate at the institute of Environmental Biology. Berrie van der Molen, postdoc, reprises his role as sixth candidate and this list too is closed by current council member Anne van Veen.

We worked together to write a new party program that focuses on rights and representation for early career scholars, and workload, sustainability and inclusivity for the university as a whole. We also decided to make our broader focus on early career scholars explicit. Although UPP was founded as ‘PhD party’ in 2017, we have worked on issues that all temporary and early career scholars struggle with. Our focus will not merely be on PhD candidates, but includes all researchers and teachers on temporary contracts. We are the only party with candidates who experience this precarity themselves, voting for us is the only way to ensure that voices of temporary workers are heard.