Biography

Adam Martinez is Assistant Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at Texas A&M University–San Antonio. His research examines how institutions organize and coordinate social life, particularly within educational contexts. He is interested in how institutional processes shape people’s relationships with one another, the ways they understand themselves and their worlds, and their possibilities for acting within and beyond existing institutional arrangements.

His scholarship draws on institutional ethnography, interaction ritual theory, and Latin American philosophy of liberation to investigate these processes. His research has examined the formation of subjectivity within teacher education, particularly the ways institutional practices organize preservice teachers’ encounters with knowledge, culture, community, and difference. 

Prior to entering higher education, he spent six years as a public school teacher in Oregon teaching fourth and sixth grades. He earned his Ph.D. in Cultural Studies in Education from the University of Texas at Austin, where his doctoral research examined the institutional management of Otherness within teacher education.