Sam Mejias
Associate Professor of Social Justice and Community Engagement
Email
sam@newschool.edu
Office Location
L - 2 West 13th Street
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Profile
Sam Mejias (he/him) is 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 explores the cultural politics of social justice and civic engagement in the US, Europe and the Middle East. His projects investigate how 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 working on two international research projects, the Wallace Foundation-funded Tracing the Enduring Effects of Community Arts Programs, and the NSF-funded STEM Inside: Learning from Creative Software Production. He also recently completed 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
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
Human rights, social justice, equity, creativity, digital media, epistemology, sound design, music, critical pedagogy, media and communications, cultural studies, neoliberalism, youth civic engagement, human-computer interaction, qualitative and quantitative research