Professor of Public Policy, Racial Justice Approaches to Environmental Racism and Social Inequality

Overview

The Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan invites applications from well-qualified individuals for a tenure-track or tenured faculty position focused on teaching, research, and public engagement related to the relationships between environmental factors in physical, built, and/or social environments and environmental racism, social inequity, and public policy. Applicants should have expertise focused on structural and other forms of racism—including racism in public policies—that create environmental racism and associated social inequities.

Applicants should also be interested in how the tools of community engagement or public policy reform can be used to create racially just and equitable physical/built/social environments or technologies that contribute to reducing social inequities including in public health, housing, transportation, food access, and work/labor.

Applications are welcome from a range of fields, including but not limited to environment and sustainability science, public health science, sociology, anthropology, geography, urban planning, science and technology studies, history, public policy, law, political science, and economics. Applicant interest and expertise can be in environmental justice issues in the United States and/or any other country or region of the world.

The position will have a university year appointment.

This position is part of a faculty cluster focused on addressing environmental racism and promoting health and social equity, and includes faculty hires at the Ford School of Public Policy, the School of Environment and Sustainability, the School of Public Health, and/or the Institute for Social Research, with additional support for cross-school collaborations within the cluster. The cluster is part of a university-wide faculty hiring initiative in anti-racism.

Over a 3-year period, the university will hire at least 20 faculty members with scholarly expertise in racial inequality and structural racism.

The Ford School is committed to attracting and retaining a distinguished and diverse faculty. Successful candidates must demonstrate a record of research excellence appropriate to their rank; ability and willingness to teach core and elective courses in undergraduate, master and PhD degree programs in public policy; interest in public and policy engagement; and a keen interest in interacting with students, faculty, staff, and policy practitioners in an interdisciplinary professional school environment.

We are open to negotiating joint appointments with other units at the university, such as the School of Environment and Sustainability, the School of Public Health, the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, the Institute for Social Research, and any other unit on campus.