Rachel Carson College Faculty Fellows
Sikina Jinnah is Rachel Carson College's new faculty chair!
The Chair of the Faculty is an Academic Senate member, other than the Provost, who is elected by the college Faculty to serve a two year term, and will serve as a member of the Executive Committee.
Dr. Jinnah is an Associate Professor in the Politics Department, an affiliated faculty member in the Environmental Studies Department, and a 2017 Andrew Carnegie Fellow. Her research focuses on the shifting locations of power and influence in global environmental governance, and in particular the role of transnational actors in environmental decision-making. Her most recent projects examine how key norms in global climate politics shape power relations, the role of U.S. preferential trade agreements in shaping environmental policy in trading partner nations, and the politics of climate engineering governance.
- Pronouns she/they
- Title
- Associate Professor, Film and Digital Media
- Associate Provost, Cowell College
- Division Arts Division
- Department
- Film and Digital Media Department
- Affiliations Digital Arts and New Media, Cowell College
- Website
- Office Location
- Digital Arts Research Center, -
- Office Hours Fridays 4pm-5:30pm (use the link above under
- Mail Stop Film and Digital Media
- Mailing Address
- 1156 High Street / Film and Digital Media Department
- Santa Cruz CA 95064
- Faculty Areas of Expertise Media Art; New Media; Video Games, Game Design, Game Studies; Animation; Documentary Film; Experimental Film; Critical Practice; Social Documentation; Virtual Reality, Immersive, and Augmented Reality Environments
- Courses FILM 80S Special Topics in Film and Digital Media; FILM 171S Special Topics in Film and Digital Media Production; FILM 179 Special Topics in Animation; FILM 197 Senior Digital Media Workshop; FILM 178 Personal Computers in Film and Video; DANM 250E Collaborative Research Project Group: Experimental Play; DANM 281 Special Topics in Digital Arts and New Media; SOCD 201C Project Planning for the Social Documentary; SOCD 202 Multiple-Platform Social Documentary Production; SOCD 293 Studies and Practice for Social Documentation, Filmmaking, and New Media
Summary of Expertise
Media Arts; Game and play design; games as forms of activism and art; animation; participatory culture; social art practice; non-fiction storytelling; theory/practice hybridity; Extended Realities (VR, AR, XR); Theatre of the Oppressed; expanded documentary; worldbuilding.
Research Interests
My creative and scholarly work explores how the intersection of art practice, game/play design, and storytelling might enable new and helpful approaches to social activism, aesthetics, and public pedagogy. My work is inherently collaborative and interdisciplinary, blending theory and practice into a hybrid form. The cinematic and the playful are central to my creative practice, while a commitment to collaborative ethics and social justice guides my process. My research spans the field of Media Arts and encompasses “serious,” documentary, and “art” games; ubiquitous and locative experience design; animation; worldbuilding; Extended Realities (VR, AR, XR); game-based learning; empathic, value-centric and participatory design; and the artistic application of theories of social justice such as anti-oppression, intersectionalism, narrative power analysis, and ethical spectacle.
Biography, Education and Training
I am an Associate Professor of Film + Digital Media at the University of California Santa Cruz with affiliations in the Digital Arts and New Media Program (DANM), the Art & Design: Games + Playable Media (AGPM), and the Social Documentation Program (SocDoc). I teach both undergraduate and graduate courses in media arts production, history, and theory. I advise students at the undergraduate, M.F.A., and Ph.D. levels. As a first-generation middle school, high school, and college graduate, I was fortunate to earn my B.F.A. from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, an institution with a progressive legacy founded on the principle that advanced education should be free to all. It was here that my interest in community-building and social practice merged with studio art practice, media-making, and humanities scholarship, forming an interdisciplinary foundation for my research into creative, embodied approaches to addressing societal challenges. I was in the inaugural cohort of the University of Southern California's Interactive Media and Games M.F.A. program in the School of Cinematic Arts (SCA) and later again in the newly established Ph.D. program in Media Arts + Practice at SCA.
Honors, Awards and Grants
In 2023, I received the UC Santa Cruz Chancellor's Innovation Impact Award, which recognizes faculty for their significant contributions to innovations that have led to transformative change and societal impact. I was named a Santa Cruz Works Titan of Tech, an initiative celebrating industry professionals who have significantly contributed to the growth of the local tech and entrepreneurial community. I received the prestigious Hewlett 50 Arts Commission in Media Arts from the William + Flora Hewlett Foundation. Much of my work is conducted through Take Action Games (TAG), a studio-collaboratory I co-founded in 2006. TAG has received numerous accolades, including the Games For Change Audience Award, the Adobe MAX Award for Social Responsibility, Honoree status in the Webby Award Activism Category, and the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Governors Award (the Academy's most prestigious honor) as part of the mtvU Sudan transmedia campaign. I was a UCSC Arts Research Institute Fellow, served on the advisory board for Games for Change, and on the IndieCade Impact Spotlight Award jury. I was a Provost's Fellow at the University of Southern California (USC), where I received the Ph.D. Achievement Award, the highest honor for doctoral candidates at USC.
