Narrative Biosketch for James Adams, 2040

James Robert (Jimbob) Adams is an associate professor of anthropology at the [Insert University]. He received his PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of California, Irvine in 2021. As an anthropologically trained, political epistemologist of science, Adams’ work identifies and traces the genealogies of the ethico-aesthetic values informing the production, evaluation, and deployment of scientific data and knowledge in contemporary American politics. His first book, Austintatious Environmentality, uncovers how the cultivation of dissonance between data cultures, practices, and ideologies amongst the environmentally conscious communities of Austin, Texas both impeded and enriched collective attempts to define and perform responsible environmental governance. His current research investigates the influence of logics of sensation on the character of interdisciplinary collaborations, looking into the role of casual appeals to aesthetics, intuition, and humor in engendering shared styles of thinking. Adams is also committed to critically rethinking the ethics and politics of anthropological knowledge production, particularly around the concept and practice of collaboration and the ethos of cultural critique. He is a co-founder and co-curator of Beyond Anthropology, an experimental publication house dedicated to multimodal expressions of conceptual dialogue emerging from collaborative fieldwork. He has also published on a wide range of topics, from collaborative ethics of research and publication, the anthropology of energy science and infrastructure, the semiotics of difference, humor, and power, and the anthropology of the left. Research interests: collaboration; STS; environmental governance; political epistemology; logics of sense; data pragmatics; data ideologies