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By Joe Arney
Photo by Kimberly Coffin (CritMedia, StratComm'18)

When asked why they choose the University of Colorado Boulder, students and faculty alike tend to cite its location, along with academic prestige, research successes and access to opportunity.

That was a big draw for Joe Izaguirre III, as well. But it wasn’t the mountains he had in mind when he signed on as an assistant professor of communication at the College of Media, Communication and Information.

Izaguirre studies how political power influences Latin identities from the lens of public rhetoric and rhetorical histories. Plenty of the source material for his book includes texts produced by activists who lived in the Colorado area.

“I hadn’t thought of this, but I’ll be able to hand-deliver the book to families who participated, instead of just dropping it in the mail,” he said. “It feels like an opportunity to have a more personal connection to the things I’ve been studying.”

Izaguirre is among the seven new tenure-track faculty joining CMCI this fall. The college also is welcoming seven nontenure-track faculty, including new appointments for professors who previously held different roles.

“I’m so excited to welcome our new faculty to CMCI,” said Lori Bergen, founding dean of the college. “As the media, communication, design and information landscape continues to dramatically change, the new perspectives these professors bring will ensure our students get a cutting-edge, immediately applicable education.”

Design thinking

For the first time, this year’s incoming cohort includes faculty from the environmental design program, which formally integrated with CMCI over the summer. Though there are no changes for current students, faculty in the program are enthusiastic about the chance to collaborate with colleagues eager to explore new applications for their work.

Martín Paddack, a teaching associate professor who joins CMCI and ENVD following seven years at Howard University, has a wealth of interests around architecture and sustainability, including participatory design—“understanding how we identify where there is need and trying to create connections with community for design.”

“I always try to inculcate into students that it’s not about coming up with an idea and saying, here’s the answer,” said Paddack, who also is founder and principal of the Washington, D.C.-based DesignMAP firm. “It comes down to communication—asking the right questions and really listening so you can identify where the needs are. If you are prescriptive, and don’t listen to your community, that’s when design starts to fail.”

Paddack brings a diverse set of interests—architecture, sustainability, social responsibility, writing, painting, woodworking—to the classroom, as well as a global perspective: He was born in Puerto Rico and raised in Peru and Uruguay before moving to D.C. as a boy. He also taught in South America and completed a painting residency in Barcelona. He helped set up a fabrication lab at Howard to ensure students developed both practical architecture experience.

“That’s something I really like about environmental design at CU—the focus on how we can apply sustainable principles across four different areas, and an emphasis on doing hands-on fabrication so that students learn the theory, but also how to apply it,” he said.

‘Great experience’ connecting with students

Most new faculty who join CMCI say they feel an instant rapport with professors in their departments, which makes the college feel like home well before they start. That was true for Dinfin K. Mulupi, as well, but she felt an equally strong connection to the journalism students she taught as part of the interview process.

“I was fascinated by their interest in learning the research behind journalism practices,” said Mulupi, a native of Kenya who came to CMCI via the PhD program at the University of Maryland, College Park.

A discussion she led critiquing news coverage of immigration, Mulupi said, sparked so much insightful discussion that she felt bad moving on to the next topic.

“It was a great experience, as an instructor, to be able to work with students who were that interested in learning and participating,” she said. “When you’re a professor, you are creating knowledge with your students, and they were so attentive and involved that I know it will be a privilege to teach them.”

Mulupi’s research looks at sexism and sexual harassment in newsrooms, and came from working on her thesis as the #MeToo movement gained momentum. She was among the first scholars to explore the topic in Kenyan newsrooms; her work has since expanded to more than 20 countries.

It’s an important topic at a time when the news industry is contracting, as “when you have a newsroom culture with sexism, harassment, racism and bigotry, you lose talented journalists who don’t feel safe and included,” she said. “I am also focusing on solutions, especially exploring how we can build safer, more inclusive newsrooms that produce news content that serves the diverse needs and interests of a wider audience.”

Pooja Iyer, who joined CMCI from the University of Texas Austin, where she completed her doctoral work in the spring. She’s also doing timely work, researching the ethics around how advertising firms collect and use data in the course of connecting to consumers.

“In my industry days, I realized my own cognitive dissonance—asking how granular we could get on a target audience while having ad blockers on my computer,” said Iyer, an assistant professor in the Department of Advertising, Public Relations and Media Design. “I believe the advertising world can play a more ethical role in how and why they’re using data, and how they’re protecting customers—because there isn’t enough literacy around this.”

It’s something her student will need to consider as they graduate, she said.

“Whether you’re in creative, account management, media planning, it doesn’t matter—you will be working with data,” Iyer said. “So, how can we best empower you to be ethical about the use of that data? As educators, that really needs to be front and center for our students.”