Appointment of Ralina L. Joseph as Vice Provost for Inclusive Excellence

May 12, 2025

Dear Bruin Community:

I am delighted to announce the appointment of Ralina L. Joseph as vice provost for inclusive excellence, effective on or before September 1, 2025.

In this capacity, Vice Provost Joseph will head our new Office of Inclusive Excellence, serving as the senior UCLA official responsible for leading and coordinating our efforts to foster and affirm a campus culture based on our core values. In promoting initiatives and activities that foster a culture of engagement, learning and dialogue for all, the vice provost’s broad areas of focus include high-level coordination of campuswide inclusive excellence initiatives, campus climate issues, education and research, faculty recruitment and retention, strategic planning, training, community relations, policy development, communications and fundraising.

A member of the University of Washington, Seattle faculty since 2005, Professor Joseph serves as the Presidential Term Professor of Communication; associate dean for equity and justice in the Graduate School; and founding director of the Center for Communication, Difference and Equity, where she is also affiliate professor of American ethnic studies and of gender, women and sexuality studies.

Professor Joseph is a respected scholar, educator and facilitator of communication and difference, whose community-engaged scholarship and teaching probes questions of how inequalities perpetuate through mediated and interpersonal interactions, and seeks to answer these questions by providing tangible tools to positively impact the world around us. The author of numerous articles and peer reviewed book chapters, Professor Joseph’s books range from the soon-to-be released Racial Exhaustion: How to Move through Racism in the Wake of DEI (NYU Press, 2025), Generation Mixed Goes to School (with Allison Briscoe-Smith, Teachers College Press, 2021), Postracial Resistance: Black Women, Media, and the Uses of Strategic Ambiguity (NYU Press 2018) and Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial (Duke University Press, 2013).

As associate dean for equity and justice in the Graduate School since 2020, a role through which she has led efforts on behalf of 17,000 graduate students across the University of Washington’s three campuses, Professor Joseph has led the design of research-informed, tri-campus resource guides, toolkits and other guided supports for graduate student units; executed the cutting-edge monthly Excellence in Graduate Education series for administrators, faculty and staff; and developed a comprehensive Excellence in Graduate Education tool that offers departments data-driven assessments from building a pipeline through post-graduation career path. As director of the Center for Communication, Difference, and Equity (CCDE), Professor Joseph has led students, faculty, staff, alumni and community members to create moments of changemaking by dialoguing about race and its intersections on campus, in community and through a traveling museum exhibit. Through research collaborations, networking opportunities, action-oriented classes, mentorship and pipeline programs and community events, the CCDE creates opportunities to more equitably reshape our world.

The recipient of numerous honors, Professor Joseph has been twice awarded the University of Washington (UW) Presidential Term Professorship (2018 and 2023), and has also received the Apex Award of Excellence (for Prying the Doors Open, 2022); the Delta Kappa Gamma Educators Book Award (for Generation Mixed, 2022); the UW Marsha Landolt Distinguished Graduate Mentor Award (2022); the ACLS/Mellon Scholars & Society Fellowship (2019-20); the International Communication Association Outstanding Book of the Year Award (for Postracial Resistance, 2019); the Barclay Simpson Prize for Scholarship in Public (for the Interrupting Privilege project, 2021); the UW Alumni Association Distinguished Service Award (2018); the Council for Advancement and Support of Education Silver Award For Diversity Programs (2017); the UW Ethnic Cultural Center Faculty Mentorship Award (2017); the UW Undergraduate Research Mentor Award (2017); the UW Women’s Center Woman of Courage Award (2017); and the UW Graduate Opportunities and Minority Achievement Program Faculty Diversity Leadership Award (inaugural recipient, 2013), among many others.. She received her B.A. in American civilization at Brown University, and M.A. and Ph.D. in ethnic studies at the University of California, San Diego.

I want to thank the search/advisory committee members for assembling an outstanding pool of candidates for this position and for their roles in recruiting Professor Joseph:

Abel Valenzuela Jr. (chair) – dean of the Division of Social Sciences and professor of labor studies, urban planning, and Chicana/o and Central American studies
Kathleen Brown – professor of clinical radiology; interim vice dean for education, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA
Cheryl I. Harris – Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Professor in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, UCLA School of Law
Brandon S. Ito – assistant clinical professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA; director of justice, equity, diversity and inclusion, UCLA Tarjan Center
David N. Myers – distinguished professor of history; Sady and Ludwig Kahn Chair in Jewish History; director, UCLA Initiative to Study Hate; director, Bedari Kindness Institute; faculty director, UCLA Dialogue across Difference Initiative
Ketema Paul – professor of integrative biology and physiology, and of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences
Suzanne L. Seplow – associate vice chancellor for student development and health
Shannon Speed – Paula Gunn Allen Chair and professor of American Indian studies, gender studies and anthropology; director, American Indian Studies Center; special advisor to the chancellor on Native American and indigenous affairs
Daniel G. Solórzano – professor of social science and comparative education and of Chicana/o and Central American studies; director, Center for Critical Race Studies in Education
Jorge Z. Torres – professor and vice chair, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry
Juliet A. Williams – professor of gender studies; chair, UCLA Social Science Interdepartmental Program; faculty co-lead, Mellon UCLA Data & Social Justice Initiative

I also wish to recognize and express my sincere gratitude to Mitch Chang for his dedicated service as interim vice provost for equity, diversity and inclusion since July 2023, and as associate vice chancellor the year prior. We look forward to his continued leadership and contributions to campus as he returns to his research and teaching this summer.

Chancellor Frenk and I recognize that this position is of paramount importance and significance to our campus community, and look forward to partnering with Vice Provost Joseph and with all of you in the vital work of putting UCLA’s principles into practice. Please join us in congratulating Ralina and warmly welcoming her to campus this fall.

Sincerely,

Darnell Hunt
Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost