The College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State University is seeking applications for a post-doc position as part of an NSF funded project: "Geodeliberation: Enabling Democratic Decision-Making in Local Communities Through Place-Based Deliberative Dialogues."
The project is focused on analyzing and supporting civic engagement of spatial decision-making in community planning context. Emphasis is placed on the roles of geo-deliberative dialogues (geo-referenced online discussions linked to issues, values, and alternative actions) in improving community’s self-efficacy in democratic decision-making. It involves understanding geodeliberative behavior in practice (through collaboration with the Borough government of State College, Pennsylvania) and development of geodeliberative tools (software development, participatory design, and assessment of online tools for geodeliberation). The project is co-led by Dr. Guoray Cai and Dr. Jack Carroll.
The post doc would work with PIs and grad students to conduct fieldwork in State College (with the Borough government and various citizen stakeholders) to describe current deliberative practices, resources, obstacles, and opportunities, and then use this ethnographic material to guide the design, installation, appropriation, use, and assessment of computational tools for geo-deliberation. The post doc would help supervise grad students, and would have the opportunity to play a leadership role particularly with respect to ethnographic research and ethnographically-driven design.
This position is available starting October 1, 2012 for a 2-year term. It is a full time, 12-month, non-tenure position, renewable dependent upon performance. This position is hosted in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at the Pennsylvania State University. We would prefer a commitment of 2 years, negotiable.
For further information about this position, please contact Guoray Cai <cai@ist.psu.edu> or Jack Carroll <jmcarroll@psu.edu>.
MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS:
Ph.D. degree from a related discipline (social science, geographical information science, informatics) is required at the time of the appointment. Appropriate skills and prior experience working on related research projects are preferred. Specific qualifications we are looking for are (in priority order)
(1) skills and sophistication in social science research.
(2) experience/enthusiasm for communicating research results at scientific conferences and in academic journals; desire to work on interdisciplinary/collaborative socio-technical research,
(3) interest/experience in community research, geographical information science, and/or digital government.
To Apply: For best consideration, submit letter of application and a resume with the names and telephone numbers of two references toGuoray Cai <cai@ist.psu.edu> or Jack Carroll <jmcarroll@psu.edu>. Search will continue until suitable candidate is appointed.