Dr Barbara Adkins is an Associate Professor at Queensland University of Technology, Australia. She is education manager at the Australasian CRC for Interaction Design (ACID) and researcher in the Humanities program at QUT. Her research focus spans sociology, urban and design studies and sociocultural aspects of interaction design, disability and the sociology of higher education. A key focus of her sociological work has been in studies of organisations, inequality, difference and identity, and the sociology of culture, applying the work of Pierre Bourdieu. Her background is based on expertise in ethnographic case study research and qualitative approaches to data collection and analysis. She has applied these theoretical, substantive and methodological insights to the field of housing and urban development, education, aspects of person-environment relationships experienced by people with cognitive impairment, and interaction design. In the context of this research activity she is currently supervising fifteenResearch Higher Degree students in projects that span the disciplines of sociology, education, urban design and interaction design.

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