Designing Just Futures

An Interdisciplinary Cluster Hire Advancing Design, Social Justice, and Indigenous, Black and Migrant Futures

The Designing Just Futures Cluster Hire seeks to recruit diverse faculty engaging in innovative and interdisciplinary research at the intersections of design and social justice that prioritize Indigenous, Black, and migrant Futures.

We encourage the recruitment of scholars who are committed to using their skills, talents, and knowledge to have a societal impact, whether it be public scholarship, engagement with civic or industry partners, and/or commitment to shaping public policy. Across these social impacts, this cluster hire emphasizes futures that might otherwise be foreclosed by structural racism, futures that are made visible when we center Indigenous, Black, and migrant communities.

For the 2022-2023 search, the Designing Just Futures Initiative will partner with the following departments, and positions will be open in each of them (Links to the Job Ads will be posted below):

2022/2023 searches for Urban Studies and Planning, Computer Science and Engineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering are closed.

2023/2024 searches will prioritize scholarship with and by Indigenous communities.
Read more below about how the Designing Just Futures initiative engages Indigeneity  

Links to apply for the faculty positions in Political Science, Communication, and Theatre & Dance and Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) are available below.

This interdisciplinary cluster hire is a collaboration with the Design Lab, and the Indigenous Futures Institute, and is part of the University of California Office of the President Advancing Faculty Diversity Program. 

With the support of EVC Elizabeth H. Simmons, and Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Becky R. Petitt, the Designing Just Futures cluster hire offers departments across UC San Diego the possibility of recruiting up to 12 scholars between 2022 and 2024 who work at the intersection of design and social justice. 

Our goal is to address significant underrepresentation in the professoriate at UC San Diego and across the UC system and simultaneously recruit scholars whose research and service center on the perspectives, epistemologies, and concerns of communities that have been traditionally left out of and marginalized within mainstream social, economic, cultural, and political systems.

The first wave of recruitment started in Fall 2022 with candidate interviews in Computer Science and Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Urban Studies and Planning in early 2023. 

The second wave of recruitment in Communication, Political Science, and Theatre & Dance will start in Summer 2023, with Interviews starting in late Summer 2023 and Fall 2023, and plans to appoint new faculty in these departments by Winter 2024.

Job Ads and Applications will be linked on this page as they become available.

Background

UC San Diego is situated as a design leader in a tri-national region: our campus is located in Kumeyaay territory, in the border region of Mexico and the United States. San Diego has the greatest number of federally recognized tribes of any county in the United States, with 18 tribal nations north of the border and 4 Kumeyaay village communities in Baja, Mexico. The San Ysidro port of entry is the busiest international land crossing in the world.

We are home to many refugee communities: Syrian, Vietnamese, Haitian, and Somali, just to name a few. Moreover, second to Hawai’i, California is home to the greatest number of Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) and Pacific Islander communities in the United States. Migration to the region by people of African descent began with the early Spanish colonial era, into the Mexican era, and indeed, is part of the origin of the Gold Rush. 

Black communities have complex relationships with the region, including familial ties and membership in the Kumeyaay Nations, Afro-Latinx histories, military participation, and historic Black communities dating back to the early 20th century. 

Recent campus efforts make this an opportune time to leverage our local context (geographically, academically, institutionally, and culturally) to recruit faculty interested in helping move our campus, border region, and global community toward just Indigenous, Black, and migrant futures. 

Steering Committee