College of Information and Communications

New Inclusive Faculty Hires

We fulfilled one of our major diversity goals in the College of Information and Communications during fall 2021, as we welcomed four new faculty of color, including two Black women and one Black man in the SJMC and one Hispanic/Latina woman in the iSchool.

All of the new faculty in the SJMC are assistant professors. All four will contribute to curriculum and research on race and ethnicity at the intersection of data, media and society. The addition of the new hires boosts the unit’s overall diversity percentage to 31; our Black faculty representation is at a record high of 16 percent, greater than the Black undergraduate student population’s 9 percent.

We are making progress and will continue the effort. Our hiring and recruitment success is the result of the CIC and SJMC’s strategic diversity, equity, and inclusion plans and implementation in all areas, including faculty and staff. The successful recruitment was the result of our college and school leadership proactively seeking and receiving support for the diversity cluster hires, the university’s only hiring and recruitment effort conducted under those auspices during 2020-2021.

Planning and implementing a workshop on diverse faculty recruitment for search committee members also played a critical role. The search committee co-chairs were intentional in their efforts to identify, recruit and hire the best and brightest out of a historical pool of 150 applicants. We are just as intentional about retaining them.

Meet the new additions to our faculty

Monica Colon Aguirre

Dr. Mónica Colón-Aguirre's area of interest is engagement, especially in relation to promoting strategies that motivate and encourage users to go beyond use of libraries and information and becoming active co- creators and designers of information services. The main focus of her work is on information science, academic libraries and LIS education, with applications to various LIS environments and populations from a social justice perspective. Some of the topics she explores in her research include information behaviors of Spanish-speaking Latinx, academic library administration, and services for diverse users.

Candice Edrington

Dr. Candice Edrington’s research agenda is interdisciplinary in nature. Having experience in both quantitative and qualitative methods, she explores the intersections of strategic communication, social movements, visual rhetoric, social networks, activism and advocacy, social media, and racial and ethnic groups through a public relations lens. Her passion for social justice and change fuels the desire to uncover both visual and textual messaging strategies that promote action and build relationships.

Jabari Evans

Evans' research focuses on the subcultures that urban youth and young adults of color develop and inhabit to understand their social environments, identity development and pursue their professional aspirations. He generally explores strategies these youth use for self-expression on social media platforms as well as other digital media tools and technologies. His forthcoming book project, Hip-Hop Civics (University of Michigan Press, forthcoming) centers on a Hip-Hop Based Education program in Chicago Public Schools and argues for rap song m

Wesley Stevens

Wesley Stevens' research focuses on the regulation of Black identity and its commodification through neoliberal discourses and consumer subjectivities. Her recent work examines the practice of blackfishing on Instagram and how social media influencers appropriate Black culture and aesthetics to build their brand and increase their following, rendering Black identity a lucrative commodity. Stevens is interested in how these consumer logics become accessible to individuals through digital platforms and are exacerbated by discriminatory algorithms. Her dissertation explores how Black influencers navigate the highly competitive and commercialized field of influencing, a space characterized by hypervisibility and a fraught politics of representation.

Challenge the conventional. Create the exceptional. No Limits.