Faculty Affairs and Academic Programs
Designing Just Futures: An Interdisciplinary Cluster Hire Advancing Design, Social Justice, and Indigenous, Black and Migrant Futures
UC San Diego, 2022-2023
Project Principal Investigators
Nadir Weibel: Associate Faculty Director, Design Lab; Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering
Theresa Ambo: Co-Director, Indigenous Futures Institute; Assistant Professor of Education Studies
Keolu Fox: Co-Director, Indigenous Futures Institute; Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Mai Nguyen: Director, Design Lab; Professor of Urban Studies and Planning
Victor Ferreira: Associate Vice Chancellor for Faculty Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion; Professor of Psychology
K. Wayne Yang: Provost, Muir College; Professor of Ethnic Studies
MarDestinee Perez: Director, Center for Faculty Diversity & Inclusion
Project Abstract
The Designing Just Futures Cluster Hire Initiative builds on UC San Diego’s 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 AFD awards and draws on the geographic, academic, institutional, and cultural strengths of our tri-national region to recruit scholars focused on design and innovation that center Indigenous, Black and migrant communities. As an interdisciplinary cluster hire, the proposal team will collaborate with the Design Lab, Indigenous Futures Institute, School of Global Policy and Strategy, Jacobs School of Engineering, School of Arts and Humanities, and School of Social Science, to recruit up to 12 scholars who work at the intersection of design and social justice. The 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 communities, perspectives, and epistemologies of communities that have been traditionally left out of mainstream social, economic, cultural, and political systems.