Associate Professor of Anthropology
Areas of Expertise: Alternative food movements, environmental anthropology, economic anthropology, Latin America, Brazil, Puerto Rico, Brooklyn, N.Y.
Ryan Adams is an anthropologist with research sites in Puerto Rico, Brooklyn, N.Y., and the Brazilian Amazon. Adams’ primary areas of research interest are centered on people and their relationship to food, farming and the environment. His current work examines alternative food movements, such as organic and local food advocacy, in Puerto Rico. He collaborates on various student-led research projects examining food, farming, and social justice in Pennsylvania.
Past projects include an analysis of local and organic food activism in Brooklyn, NY, the reaction of large landowners in the Amazon to environmental activism, folk models of predicting climate fluctuation, a study of organic farming in Bloomington, Ind., and analysis of geolocated interview data with a time-series of remotely sensed imagery.
Selected Publications
Adams, Ryan T. (2016) “Local and Organic Food Movements” in Routledge International Handbook of Environmental Anthropology, Helen Kopnina and Eleanor Shoreman-Ouimet (eds). Chapter 26. New York, NY: Routledge International Press. Pp. 329-343.
Brondizio, Eduardo, Ryan Adams, and Stefano Fiorini (2016) “Environmental Anthropology” Chapter 2, Routledge International Handbook of Environmental Anthropology, Helen Kopnina and Eleanor Shoreman-Ouimet (eds). Chapter 2. New York, NY: Routledge International Press. Pp. 10-30.
Adams, Ryan T. (2015). Becoming “Environmentally Responsible” Soybean Farmers: Neoliberal Environmentality in Santarém. CAFE: Culture, Agriculture, Food, and Environment. 37(2): 84-95.
Adams, Ryan T. (2015) An Emerging Alliance of Ranchers and Farmers in the Brazilian Amazon. Tipití, Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America. 13(1): 63-78.
Moran, Emilio, Ryan Adams, Bryn Bakoyéma, Stefano Fiorini, and Bruce Boucek. (2006). "Human Strategies for Coping with El Niño Related Drought in Amazônia." Climatic Change Vol. 77 (3-4), Pp. 343-361.