My specialist teaching areas are social psychology, cultural and environmental psychology. I like to teach psychology as a subject that has direct personal relevance and make lots of links between topics and familiar experiences, everyday life, popular culture, art and literature. I like to bring different media (art, film, advertising) to illustrate ideas and concepts in psychology.

I like to teach psychology in a way that encourages students to stand back and contemplate the complexity of human life with a sense of open curiosity. I believe the value of psychology lies in encouraging us to see reality from new perspectives - this, for me, is the key to the change that happens in the process of learning, and to psychology's contribution to personal and social change more generally.

I think that good teaching involves more than the transfer of knowledge from active expert (lecturer) to passive recipient (lecturer). It also encompasses helping students to develop the capacity to look at the familiar and taken-for-granted in new ways - to gain confidence in using the tools of psychology to do so - the research skills, concepts, forms of argumentation and expression.

I do not adhere to the idea that there are strict boundaries between psychology and related subjects such as philosophy, sociology, biology and ecology. I draw on work from these disciplines as well as classic and contemporary work in psychology to make sense of core curriculum topics with students.

As an active academic and research psychologist, I am fortunate to be able to find many opportunities to bring my own research into teaching. In 2014 I received a University of 映客直播 Award for Excellence in Facilitating Learning, after being nominated by undergraduate psychology students.

I am a sociocultural psychologist. This means my work is particularly focused on how individual behaviour and experience shapes, and is shaped, by environment - interpersonal, social, cultural and material factors.

My current research focus is how people engage with nature on many different levels. This includes applying social psychological and psychosocial perspectives to topics in which experiences and ideas of nature play a central part like nature connectedness and the healing benefits of being in nature; but it also includes how people feel, talk and think about climate change, ecological crisis, sustainable development. I engage in research exploring these topics.

My other research interests stem from my interest in the relationship between society, culture and psychological processes. I have researched and written about identity in relation to social representations of class (with Dr Jayne Raisborough); gender and parenting (with Dr Carl Walker); and consumerism and ecological crisis. I also have a long-term research interest in the social, cultural and psychological significance of silence (with Dr Dave Harley).

Current research projects

• Anthropocene Psychology: Being human in a more-than-human world (Routledge). Single-authored monograph, in progress.
• The Grow Project
• Shared silence. Facilitating and researching the benefits of experiencing silence in shared social spaces.
• How do we explain a connection to nature? Modifying the Nature Connectedness Scale (NCS) in the light of qualitative research (2015-current)

Previous research projects

• The Thrown Away: Towards a Manifesto of Dispossession. Joint Principal Investigator (with Dr Jayne Raisborough) on this Independent Social Research Foundation funded project. Further information can be found at the .
• Ethical Consumption. With Dr Jayne Raisborough, Research Strategy Committee funding awarded to commission a Mass Observations Directive on ethical consumption. See Adams & Raisborough (2008; 2010)

Research centres and groups

• Social Science and Policy Research Centre (SSPARC)
• Centre for research in spatial, environmental and cultural politics