Barbara Adams
Assistant Professor of Design and Social Justice
Email
adamsb01@newschool.edu
Office Location
Parsons Faculty Hotseat
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Barbara Adams is a sociologist whose interdisciplinary research looks at how knowledge is produced and political action is initiated through art and design projects. She received her PhD in Sociology from the New School for Social Research (NSSR) where her doctoral research was supported by a fellowship from the Graduate Institute for Design, Ethnography, and Social Thought (GIDEST). Barbara is the coordinator of the Anthropology + Design Graduate Minor.
Her current book project is focused on creative and poetic forms of social research and considers how art and design might redirect sociological thinking. She is also working on a manuscript that examines the politics of helping in socially engaged art and design projects. Her publications include the book Design as Future-Making (Bloomsbury Academic), the essay “Centers of Experience: Bodies and Objects in Today’s Museums” in Experience Design (Bloomsbury Academic), an afterword ("Proximity and the Ethics of Engagement") to the book Collaborative Social Design (Routledge), and essays ("Art, Fabulation, and Practicing the Worlds We Want" and "Coordinates of Speculative Solidarity") for the UNHCR series, Project Unsung. Barbara is co-editor in chief of the journal Design and Culture and a researcher at the Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability Lab (DESIS Lab). She was previously the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Design at Wesleyan University where she taught in the Science in Society Program, the Center for the Study of Public Life, and the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance.