The Department of Chicana/o Studies at MSU Denver invites applications for a full-time open rank, tenured or tenure-track (Category I) position in Chicana/o Studies with appointment to begin Fall 2021.
MSU Denver, a Hispanic Serving Institution, is located on a commuter campus in the heart of Denver, Colorado. The University is particularly interested in teacher-scholars who have intention to activate principles of equity and inclusion and a demonstrated commitment to improving access to higher education for under-represented groups.
The Chicana/o Studies Department (CHS) adheres to the core values of social justice, human rights, self-empowerment, cultural responsiveness and service to community. Our teaching, scholarship and mentoring are informed by Liberatory theories and pedagogical practices articulated in the work of scholars such as Paolo Freire who assumes that the teacher is not all-knowing or neutral; the teacher shares their knowledge within their philosophical framework and both teachers and students have a vested interest in the reciprocal process of learning. He states in Pedagogy of Freedom Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage, “To teach is not to transfer knowledge but to create the possibilities for the production or construction of knowledge…Whoever teaches learns in the act of teaching, and whoever learns teaches in the act of learning” (p. 30-31). Moreover, as bell hooks notes, “The classroom, with all its limitations, remains a location of possibility. In that field of possibility, we have the opportunity to labor for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades, an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. This is education as the practice of freedom” (Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, 1994, p. 207).
Our mission is to prepare and empower culturally responsive students to engage in critical thinking about the sociohistorical, multicultural, intersectional, and global contexts in which they live, learn and work; understand the changing demographics in US society; and to articulate and analyze public policy issues and implications grounded in the diverse experiences, expressions, social conditions of Chicano/a/x and Latino/a/x and Indigenous communities.
