Barbara Adams is a social researcher and Assistant Professor of Art, Design, and Social Justice at Parsons School of Design. She is also the current coordinator of the Anthropology + Design Graduate Minor at the New School for Social Research. Barbara is co-editor in chief of the journal Design and Culture and Associate Director of Research and Academic Initiatives at the Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability Lab (DESIS Lab).

 

She was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow in Design Strategies at Parsons. From 2017-2019, she was the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Design at the Center for Pedagogical Innovation (CPI) at Wesleyan University where she taught in the Science in Society Program, the Center for the Study of Public Life, and the graduate program at the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance. At Wesleyan she also contributed to the development of the Integrated Design, Engineering, and Applied Sciences (IDEAS) minor. Her 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). 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) and the essay “Centers of Experience: Bodies and Objects in Today’s Museums” in Experience Design (Bloomsbury Academic).

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