[AISWorld] Post doc - socio-technical studies of geodeliberation

[John M.Carroll]

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 will analyze and facilitate civic engagement and spatial decision-making in a community planning context.  It is collaborative with the State College Borough government. We will investigate current geodeliberative concepts and practices, develop software tools to support geo-referenced online discussions linked to issues, values, and alternative actions, and then assess tool use and changes in beliefs, expectations, and practices. 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 three key things 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

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 participatory design.

This position is available starting immediately for a 2-year term. It is a full time, 12-month, non-tenure position, renewable dependent upon performance. This position is in Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology.

Please contact Guoray Cai <cai at ist.psu.edu> or Jack Carroll <jmcarroll at psu.edu> for further information/to apply.
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