Associate Research Scholar

Summary Description:

The Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) seeks applications for a full-time Associate Research Scholar as part of the Andrew Mellon Foundation funded initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities at the Center for Spatial Research. A Master's degree in Architecture, Design Research, or a closely related field (e.g., Urban Planning, Computational Design, Geography, Landscape Architecture) is required. Candidates with training in the design disciplines whose research practices involve innovative digital, visual, and multidisciplinary approaches at the intersection of architecture, urbanism, and the humanities are invited to apply. This one-year appointment will begin on July 1, 2021 and is renewable contingent on satisfactory performance and available funding.

The Center for Spatial Research (CSR) was established in 2015 as a hub for urban research that links design, architecture, urbanism, the humanities, and data science. It sponsors research and curricular activities built around new technologies of mapping, data visualization, data collection, and data analysis. CSR focuses on data literacy as well as working to open up new areas of research and inquiry with advanced design tools to help scholars and students, as well as collaborators and audiences, to understand cities worldwide―past present and future.

CSR is committed to rigorous and reliable work with data, to harnessing the most powerful techniques of design and visualization, and to critical reflection on the limits and ideologies of both data and its representation. CSR collaborates with researchers and advocates across a variety of disciplines and institutions to communicate information clearly, critically, responsibly, and provocatively. Based in the disciplines of design, architecture and urbanism, CSR makes links with and bring spatial expertise to humanities as well as the sciences.

The Associate Research Scholar will report to the Director of CSR. Successful candidates must have experience and interest in using GIS-based research practices to open up new questions in, and modes of representation of, urban environments. The incumbent will contribute to projects underway at CSR, work on independent research on a topic(s) proposed by the incumbent and will contribute to the design and teaching of the Center's workshop and seminar courses.

The Associate Research Scholar will be an active contributor to projects underway at the Center related to the Center's current research foci, Conflict Urbanism and Spatial Inequality, or to research topics CSR adopts in the future. This work may involve supervision of graduate research assistants, and may result in outputs that include contributing to co-authored publications, publicizing of collaborative work for popular press and grant reports, design of exhibitions among other formats. Approximately thirty percent of the incumbent's time will be dedicated to this collaborative research.

The incumbent will also be invited to propose new avenues of research, publication, or collaboration addressing CSR's current research foci. The project(s) proposed by the research scholar―to be completed during their time at CSR―should aim to reach multiple disciplines and experiment with methods and modes of presenting academic research using visual media, mapping, and/or data visualization. This work will be published on the Center's website in a media or platform appropriate to the work, and the incumbent will be encouraged to find further avenues for publication. The Associate Research Scholar will be eligible to receive assistance from graduate student researchers in this work. Forty percent of the incumbent's time will be dedicated to this proposed research.

The incumbent will teach one lab-oriented course run by CSR. CSR is dedicated to providing open source tutorials related to critical approaches to mapping and data visualization used in CSR research; the incumbent will contribute to this library of tutorials on topics related to their interests and/or courses they teach. These activities advancing the critical pedagogies of CSR's academic initiatives will make up approximately thirty percent of the incumbent's time.