Paul C. Adams

Paul C. Adams is a Professor in the Department of Geography and the Environment at the University of Texas at Austin's College of Liberal Arts, where he has served as Director of the Urban Studies Program since 2003. His interdisciplinary work bridges geography, media studies, and communication, with a focus on digital media's sociospatial implications.

Adams earned his Bachelor of Environmental Design from the University of Colorado-Boulder (1984) followed by an M.S. (1990) and Ph.D. (1993) in geography from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His academic journey reflects a deep commitment to understanding spatial dimensions of human experience.

His research explores geographical communications, place imagery in media, and digital disentanglement, with recent work examining geopolitical discourse, climate change communication, and refugee spatial experiences. As founder of the Association of American Geographers' Media Geography Specialty Group (now "Media and Communication"), he pioneered frameworks for analyzing how media shapes place perception and political subjectivity.

Analysis of his 2021-2025 publications reveals three dominant trajectories: (1) Digital media's intimate politics through entanglement/disentanglement lenses, (2) Geopolitical discourse analysis applied to climate change and US-China relations, and (3) Spatial dimensions of forced migration and cultural landscape transformation. These intersect with subfields including media geography, political ecology, and digital humanities.

Key honors include:

• Fulbright Research Fellowship to the University of Bergen (2010)
• Fulbright Fellowship to McGill University/University of Montreal (2001)
• Ander Visiting Professorship at Karlstad University (2016-2017)

Adams teaches foundational courses including GRG 305 (This Human World) and URB 315 (Urban Studies Research Methods), alongside specialized seminars in media geography and political geography. His research has secured major funding including the Research Council of Norway's ViSmedia project (2015-2020), for which he held an Associate Professor II appointment at the University of Bergen.

He leads the Media Geography Specialty Group and maintains active collaborations with scholars across Poland, Sweden, and Norway, driving international research on digital place-making and geopolitical discourse through collective publications and interdisciplinary projects.