Faculty

Profile

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). From 2022-2024, Barbara coordinated the Anthropology + Design Graduate Minor at NSSR.

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. 

Recent Publications

Books and Book Chapters

Adams, Barbara (2023) “Proximity and the Ethics of Engagement,” in Collaborative Social Design with Indigenous Communities, Carmen Malvar. Routledge.

Acarín, Xavier and Barbara Adams (2015) “Centers of Experience: Bodies and Objects in Today’s Museums,” in Experience Design, Peter Benz (ed.). London: Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 119-132.

Adams, Barbara and Susan Yelavich, eds. (2014) Design as Future-Making, London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Essays and Interviews

“Public Library Workers: Unconditional Hospitality and Shared Leadership,” Tensions of Care, Antipode, (with John Bruce), forthcoming 2025.

“From Improvisation to Institutional Change: Understanding the Pandemic through Oral History,” Design and Culture 13(1) (with Denise Milstein), 2021.

"Design and the Pandemic: The Early Months," Design and Culture 13(1) (with Betti Marenko, and Jilly Traganou), 2021.

“Introduction from the New Editorial Team,” Design and Culture 11(2): 153-5 (with Mahmoud Keshavarz, and Jilly Traganou), 2019.

“Public Libraries as Engines of Democracy: A Research and Pedagogical Case Study on Design for Re-Entry,” NORDES 2019: Who Cares? no. 8 (with Mariana Amatullo, John Bruce, Lara Penin, Eduardo Staszowski), 2019.

"The Coordinates of Speculative Solidarity." Project Unsung, Innovation Service, UNHCR, 2021.

"Art, Fabulation, and Practicing the Worlds We Want." Project Unsung, Innovation Service, UNHCR, 2021.

“Old New Territories,” International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP), 2013.

“This Must Be the Place,” Spazio Morris,(with David Peppas), 2012.

“Dispatches from Occupy Wall Street,” Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, 2011.

“Cranbrook Estate,” Pulse Contemporary Art Fair, 2010.