Academic Job Opportunities

Assistant/Associate Professor of Media, Culture and Law with a focus on Designing Just Futures

The Department of Communication at UC San Diego seeks faculty candidates at the level of Assistant/Associate Professor whose research, teaching, and service will advance scholarship and institutional solutions for designing more just and equitable systems and structures. We seek an interdisciplinary scholar, artist, or practitioner who engages with the study and design of laws and policies related to media, communication, and culture with a focus on Native American/Alaska Native/Pacific Islander, Indigenous, Black, and/or migrant futures.

This search is part of a UC San Diego-wide cluster hire on Designing Just Futures (DJF) that aims to recruit scholars, artists, or practitioners who can contribute to the advancement of design, social justice, and futures and seeks engagement across disciplines to address issues of territory, access and equity, and social and political debates pertinent to Native American, Indigenous, Black, and migrant communities, while also working within their home departments and professional communities. 

Faculty hired under this initiative will join the UC San Diego Design Lab and the Indigenous Futures Institute to forge a new paradigm of engagement and collaboration that draws on the geographic, academic, institutional, and cultural strengths of our tri-national region across Southern California, Baja California, and the Kumeyaay region.

As a member of the UC San Diego Design Lab and the Indigenous Futures Institute, the successful candidate will center Native American, Indigenous, Black, and/or migrant people and communities in collaborative and shared efforts toward inclusive and justice-oriented design solutions to complex socio-technical problems. We seek an interdisciplinary scholar, artist, or practitioner whose work interrogates what it means to design, and whose work decenters dominant technocratic design practices in favor of interdisciplinary approaches informed by Native American and Indigenous Studies, Black, and/or migration studies in dialogue with critical race studies and critical legal studies. We seek a colleague who, likewise, addresses questions of how design engages with or raises critical questions about legal ownership, territory, and citizenship.

Areas of research and design may include but are not limited to the following: legal questions in genetics and health, for example as they relate to consent in genetic data collection and the ownership and management of digital genetic databases; the unauthorized appropriation of Indigenous, Black or migrant knowledge and culture, its relationship to conventional intellectual property laws, and its implications for envisioning alternative conceptions of law and property; questions of surveillance, power, and freedom that arise in Indigenous, Black and migrant interactions with digital technology; the questions raised for citizenship, territory, and sovereignty in both the breach and upholding of Indigenous, Black and migrant rights in treaties, laws and policies at federal, state, and local level; questions of justice that arise at the intersection between Indigenous, Black and migrant rights and disability rights, including conceptions of disability and access; responses to the challenges of environment and climate change, for example in rights to water and other resources, and forest management. In all these areas we are especially interested in scholars whose work holds promise for Indigenous, Black and migrant futures.

As part of their teaching portfolio, faculty hired under Designing Just Futures will be expected to design and teach courses that align with the Department of Communication, the Design Lab, and the Indigenous Futures Institute programs.

The faculty member will advance UC San Diego’s commitment to the inclusion of Indigenous, Black, and/or migrant communities, anti-racism, anti-oppression, equity, and social justice. We especially welcome candidates whose professional experience, community engagement, and personal background have facilitated their understanding of and ability to better serve students from Indigenous and other underrepresented populations.

Application and Submission Deadlines

Applicants should apply by October 13, 2023 to ensure full consideration by the committee.  Applications will continue to be accepted until March 23, 2024, but those received after the initial review date will only be considered if the position has not yet been filled. 

For Assistant-level applications, click here: https://apol-recruit.ucsd.edu/JPF03665 

For Associate-level applications, click here: https://apol-recruit.ucsd.edu/JPF03696 

Lecturers

We are seeking applicants for Lecturer appointments (Unit 18-Non Senate Faculty) level. The application numbered JPF03517 may be found on the UCSD Recruit site. Prospective applicants should refer to the list of approved Communication courses in the UCSD course catalog when submitting an application.

For full consideration, applications should be submitted by the following deadlines:

• Fall, Winter and/or Spring Quarters: February 28, 2023
• Winter and/or Spring Quarters: August 15, 2023
• Spring Quarter: December 1, 2023

Applications will continue to be accepted on a rolling basis.