Barbara Adams is a social researcher who teaches in the MFA programs in Transdisciplinary Design and in Interior Design at Parsons School of Design. She also teaches undergraduates in the School of Design Strategies. 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 Science in Society Program, the Center for the Study of Public Life, and the graduate program at the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance. 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). Barbara is co-editor in chief of the journal Design and Culture and an ethnographic researcher at the Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability Lab (DESIS Lab).