Fonna Forman
Associate Professor of Political Science
Ph.D. University of Chicago 2001
Political Theory
Fonna Forman is Associate Professor of Political Science and (with Gerry Mackie) is founding Co-Director of the UCSD Center on Global Justice. She is a political theorist whose commitments to "social science research in action" and collaborative community development cross conventional boundaries between theory and practice, manifesting long research interests in moral psychology, collective action, social norms, international ethics and global justice, as well as historical interests in the development of cosmopolitan ideas from antiquity to the present. She has published extensively on Adam Smith’s international thought, and the history and theory of international ethics, always emphasizing the “spatial texture” of human experience – the impact of the local, the proximate, the informal, and the small-scale on human reason, emotion, connection, interest, choice-making, and action.
She serves on the steering committees of the UCSD Global Health Initiative, the Global Health minor, the Urban Studies and Planning Program, and IICAS; and is participant in various international initiatives and policy networks focused on international human rights and global cooperation. Current work includes a set of working papers on developments in cognitive science and c18 moral psychology; a volume of collected essays (with Amartya Sen) on critical interventions in global justice theory; and a project (with Teddy Cruz) on civic culture and the built environment, emphasizing exemplary tactics of progressive urban transformation in Latin America. From 1999-2001 Fonna was assistant editor of Political Theory, and is currently editor of the Adam Smith Review. In Spring 2012 she will be Research Fellow in Political Theory at Queen Mary, University of London, organizing an interdisciplinary workshop on "Global Justice."