PhD Research Assistantship
Environmental Justice and Scientific Knowledge
Project Description: Jennifer Carrera, Department of Sociology and Environmental Science and Policy Program, seeks applicants from incoming Michigan State University graduate students in the PhD program in sociology for a half-time (20 hours per week), two-year research assistantship (RA) position through the Department of Sociology to start in Fall 2019. The Department of Sociology at MSU provides competitive, multi-year funding packages with tuition and health insurance for highly qualified applicants. The successful RA candidate will be working with Professor Carrera on a project that uses a community based participatory research (CBPR) approach to co-develop low-cost technologies for water quality monitoring. The aims of this work include investigating relationships between environmental health literacy, trust in science related to local environmental quality, and community capacity for mobilizing to protect water-affected public health. The successful candidate will assist with Professor Carrera’s research and engagement activities during the research period, which include working with Flint, Michigan, community members to co-develop a mobile Android application aimed at facilitating community level decision making about environmental risks and public health.
Desired qualifications: The successful candidate will have strong interests in environmental inequalities, community engagement, and scientific knowledge. Applicants should have strong critical thinking and analytic skills. Applicants should be willing to be reflective about how knowledge is produced, the partialness of all knowledge, and the limitations of one’s own personal knowledge frame. Applicants must have good listening skills and need to be comfortable being challenged within a community context. Students with a strong foundation for success in graduate study in sociology and with backgrounds in other social sciences, health sciences, engineering, computer sciences, and game design and development are strongly encouraged to apply.
ESPP Program: In fulfillment of the requirements for this position, the successful candidate will be a member of MSU’s Environmental Science and Policy Program (ESPP). ESPP provides an institutional home for innovative, interdisciplinary, environmental research across campus. To learn more about ESPP and ESPP’s Doctoral Dual Major, go to: http://environment.msu.edu/index.php.
To Apply: Interested applicants should contact Dr. Jennifer Carrera (jcarrera@msu.edu) with any questions they have about the position. More information about Professor Carrera’s work can be accessed here: https://msu.edu/~jcarrera/. The deadline to apply to the PhD program in sociology at MSU is December 15. For more information, go to: https://sociology.msu.edu/grad/apply. For questions about the PhD program in sociology, contact the Graduate Program Director, Sandra Marquart-Pyatt (marqua41@msu.edu).