Sam Mejias
Dean, School of Art Media and Technology
Email
sam@newschool.edu
Office Location
L - 2 West 13th Street
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Profile
Sam Mejias (he/him) is Dean of the School of Art, Media and Technology, Associate Professor of Social Justice and Community Engagement in the School of Design Strategies, and a Visiting Fellow at London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Working primarily as an ethnographer, Sam's research focuses on young people, the arts, and learning, and also on the cultural politics of social justice and civic engagement. His projects investigate how creativity, design, discourse and communication influence the promotion of critical learning, equity, and civic engagement in the lives of young people in formal and informal spaces.
Sam is currently Principal Investigator on the Wallace Foundation-funded international research project Tracing the Enduring Effects of Community Arts Programs. He also recently completed the National Science Foundation-funded STEM Inside: Learning from Creative Software Production and the LSE-funded study Empowering Democratic Citizenship through Education in Kuwait.
In addition to academic research, Sam is a multi-instrumentalist, sound designer and multimedia producer. His research-led creative practices experiment with music, sound engagement, and video.
Degrees Held
PhD, Human Rights Education, University College London
MA, International Educational Development, Columbia University Teachers College
BA, College of William and Mary
Recent Publications
Baldridge, B., Kirschner, B., DiGiacomo, D., Mejias, S., & Vasudevan, D. (2023). Out-of-School Time Programs in the United States in an Era of Racial Reckoning: Insights on Equity from Practitioners, Scholars, Policy Influencers, and Young People. Educational Researcher.
Bevan, B., Rosin, M., Mejias, S., Wong, J., & Choi, M. (2022). Food for thought: Immersive storyworlds as a way into scientific meaning-making. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 1-44.
Mejias, S.,Thompson, N., Sedas, R. M., Rosin, M., Soep, E., Peppler, K., Roche, J., Wong, J., Hurley, M., Bell, P., & Bevan, B. (2021). The trouble with STEAM and why we use it anyway. Science Education, 105(2), 209-231.
Banaji, S. & Mejias, S. (2020). Youth Active Citizenship in Europe – Ethnographies of Participation. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Bevan, B., Mejias, S., Rosin, R. & Wong, J. (2020). The Main Course Was Mealworms: The epistemics of art and science in public engagement. Leonardo.
Mejias, S. & Banaji, S. (2019). Backed into a corner: Challenging media and policy representations of young people in the UK. Information, Communication, and Society, 22(12), 1714-1732.
Research Interests
Art, creativity, critical pedagogy, cultural studies, digital media, equity and justice, human-computer interaction, media and communications, music, qualitative and quantitative research, sound design, youth civic engagement