Fonna Forman

Fonna Forman is a professor of Political Theory and founding Director of the Center on Global Justice at the University of California, San Diego. A theorist of ethics and public culture, she is best known for her revisionist work on Adam Smith, recuperating the ethical, social, spatial and public dimensions of his thought. Present work focuses on the intersection of ethics, public culture, policy and the city - including human rights at the urban scale, climate justice, border ethics and equitable urbanization.

Blurring conventional boundaries between theory and practice, and transgressing the fields of architecture and urbanism, political theory and urban policy, visual arts and public culture, Forman partners closely with UCSD urbanist and architect Teddy Cruz on a variety of urban research projects and public interventions. From 2012-13 they served as special advisors on civic and urban initiatives for the City of San Diego and led the development of its Civic Innovation Lab. Together they founded the UCSD Cross-Border Initiative, a platform for engaged research and teaching on poverty and social equity in the San Diego-Tijuana border region. And they are principals in Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman, a research-based political and architectural practice investigating issues of informal urbanization, civic infrastructure and public culture, with an emphasis on Latin American cities. Their work has been profiled widely in important publications including Domus, ArtForum, The New York Times, Next City, and e-flux; and exhibited in prestigious cultural venues across the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, New York; Das Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; the Medellín Museum of Modern Art; and the 2016 Shenzhen Biennial of Urbanism and Architecture, among others.

Forman is an advocate for engaged social science, and deepening university-community research partnerships. At UC San Diego, she is affiliated with the Center for Energy Research, and serves on the advisory boards of the Climate Neutrality Task Force, the Urban Studies and Planning program, the Global Health program, FF21 (Food and Fuel for the 21st Century), the Center for Tomorrow's California and the US-Mexico Binational Consortium on Border Challenges, a network of research universities across the border region.