Cluster Hiring Initiative
Global Migration: Engaging Inequalities, Affirming Communities
The Dean of Social Sciences announces a new cluster hiring initiative focused on recruiting faculty with expertise on the topic of Global Migration. In naming this area of excellence, the Dean has invited departments across the Division to participate in a multi-year hiring initiative, though which we seek to achieve deep and sustained interdisciplinary expertise and collaboration on Global Migration, in research, teaching, and service.
We are searching for five new faculty during the 19-20 academic year in the following departments:
- Assistant Professor, Sociocultural Anthropologist of Human Migration, Department of Anthropology
- Assistant Professor in Migration and Immigration, Political Science Department
- Assistant Professor of Sociology of Immigration/Migration
- Feminist Studies – Coming Soon
- Global Studies – Coming Soon
The Global Migration area of excellence is intended to foster publicly facing research and pedagogy, which can advance our frontiers of understanding, stimulate public dialogue, and when appropriate propose concrete actions on this topic of critical contemporary importance. The topic is more crucial still, given UC Santa Barbara’s pioneering designation as a Hispanic Serving Institution, enriched enormously by a student body, faculty and staff with deep ties to immigrant communities. These ties, in turn, become a mandate for our University to take assertive leadership in developing research-driven societal policies and practices toward immigration that are humane, fair, and historically contextualized. With great enthusiasm, we can report that in the 18-19 recruitment season, this “cluster hire” strategy yielded two new faculty members in Chicano/a Studies, Juanita Garcia and Daina Sanchez, and one in Anthropology, Raquel Pacheco.
Together with nearly 20 faculty members across the campus with interests in this area, we expect the faculty hired under the Global Migration cluster to play a central role in the Migration Initiative, bringing fresh perspectives and new energies to develop an innovative and integrated curriculum, recruit graduate students, plan high-profile scholarly program, and advance collective research interests.