Assistant Professor of Public Facing Border Scholarship

Description

As part of San Diego State University’s (SDSU) Strategic Plan and the goal of leveraging our university’s unique identity, SDSU aims to hire two initial faculty to enhance the quantity and quality of public facing and interdisciplinary border scholarship. Located in a biodiversity hotspot and the most diverse county in the continental US, just north of the San Ysidro/Tijuana port of entry – the busiest border crossing in the world that bisects Kumeyaay homelands – SDSU has long been an incubator for U.S./Mexico border-related research (i.e., binational biodiversity and water management, migration and displacement, national securitization, regional development). SDSU is looking to recruit two scholars to join a diverse cohort of colleagues from a broad range of disciplines and a variety of academic and research backgrounds addressing borders broadly defined both geographically and conceptually. Candidates must clearly demonstrate how their research, scholarship, and/or creative activities are collaborative/interdisciplinary and engage with borders as understood in their disciplines.

While we live in an increasingly interconnected world, nation-state borders and the concomitant processes impacted by their existence (migration, policing, free trade, illicit economy, drug trafficking, water and air pollution, water/natural resource management to name a few) remain as steadfast concerns as ever. Border spaces have also been sites of positive change and interactions including binational trade and development, multi-ethnic communities, language diffusion, and collaborative engagements in addressing multinational concerns. At the time of the fall of the Berlin wall, there were only about a dozen border walls around the world. Today nearly a hundred border walls have been built the world over. The U.S./Mexico border has been an integral site for much theorizing (border as laboratory, borderlands theory, border gnosis) that has led to the broader interdisciplinary field of Border Studies, anchored in the study of nation-state borders, but itself crossing boundaries across disciplinary traditions, objects of study, sites of research, and modes of inquiry. Border Studies has also been an intellectual space for challenging the boundaries of academic disciplines and the “two cultures” (Sciences and Humanities; “facts” vs. “values”) that have long structured and delimited epistemological divides in academic thinking and knowledge production. Public-facing scholarship is academic work designed to transcend such divides and be relevant to broad audiences or practitioners who might take the scholarship to the people most affected in timely and ethical ways

Qualifications

As we continue to develop one of SDSU’s areas of expertise in border studies, we seek applicants who engage in border scholarship broadly conceived. We welcome applications from scholars in any discipline whose work addresses any of a myriad of border issues as understood in their fields and not just limited to nation state borders. Examples may include, but are not limited to, Indigenous Borderlands, border ethnomusicology, history of science, borders of disciplinary thinking, cross-border land and resource management, binational biodiversity, transborder ecologies and built environments, chaos theory, transnational public health, border art, comparative border studies, cross-border leadership and entrepreneurship, border cities, border economies, technologies of care, border cinema, sustainable agriculture, alternative sustainable tourism management, borderlands activism(s), border environmental health, transborder environmental engineering, sustainable planning in border regions, multinational public policy, border indigenous sciences. Scholars who work on different border sites around the world, at and beyond the U.S/Mexico border, and have demonstrated success with extramural funding, are encouraged to apply.

Understanding Public Scholarship

In the current fast-paced media world, public scholarship takes many forms. Podcasts, crossover/mass market books, K-12 curriculum, media interviews, high-traffic/interactive educational websites, art and performance, cinema, and public writing are all ways for scholars to share knowledge and pose questions with an audience beyond the academy. Practitioners who also have a foot in the academic world is another illustrative example of how one might contribute to public scholarship. Further examples include regular or consistent op-eds, public lectures, exhibits or performances, and social media visibility. This varies according to disciplines as well. For example, there are well established conversations in Museum Studies about how public-facing scholarship is about conducting research, teaching, and practice both with and for the public. Research models can also include work alongside and in collaboration with