James Adam’s research and teaching focus on current debates in energy and environmental ethics, experimental ethnography, and the politics of knowledge production.

Adams’s research examines the multi-scalar dynamics of sociotechnical change and considers their implications for developing more just and effective modes of environmental and energy governance. His publications include Knowledge infrastructure and research agendas for quotidian Anthropocenes, Petroghosts and Just Transitions, and What is Energy Literacy? .

Adams’s dissertation  project, The Transition is Out of Joint: On Petro-Capitalism and Renewable Energy Transition in Austin, Texas, shows how sedimented histories of racial exclusion and petro-capitalist development continue to haunt Austin’s renewable energy transition. That is, the systems of social, spatial, and epistemic divisions that enabled fossil fuel systems to emerge, along with their rampant social and environmental injustices, are also shaping the City’s transition to renewable energy.  As such, Adams argues that part of the challenge of just energy transitions lies in developing new modes of coordination and collaboration across systems, jurisdictions, and domains of expertise – well beyond the domain of energy expertise per se. Adams’s work points to new methods and analytical frameworks that can better account for the full ecology of entangled systems involved in sociotechnical change. 

Adams also has extensive experience leading an array of collaborative projects involving diverse faculty and students as well as local professionals, artists, activists, and other community partners. In 2018/19, he was the lead coordinator of the UCI Center for Ethnography’s Visualizing Toxic Subjects project, which leveraged digital research infrastructure to experiment with new modes of ethnographic collaboration, data visualization, and expression. He also served as a co-instructor for two Quotidian Anthropocene field campuses, which brought together diverse researchers, practitioners, and educators to co-produce understandings of environmental change in the regions around St. Louis, MO and New Orleans, LA. For the past two years, Adams has served as the Publications Lead for Dr. Ali Kenner’s Energy Rights Project at Drexel University.

Learn more about James Adams here.