Fonna Forman

Co-director, UCSD Center on Global Justice

Co-director, UCSD / BLUM Cross-Border Initiative

Fonna Forman is founding co-director of the UCSD Center on Global Justice and the UCSD / BLUM Cross-Border Initiative. She is a political theorist in the Department of Political Science best known for her revisionist work on Adam Smith, recuperating the ethical, spatial, social and public dimensions of his political economy. Current work focuses on theories and practices of global justice as they manifest at local and regional scales, and the role of civic participation in strategies of equitable urbanization. Present sites of investigation include Medellín, Colombia and the San Diego-Tijuana border region.

She is presently writing a book on Adam Smith in Latin America. Recent work includes a volume with Amartya Sen on critical interventions in global justice theory, papers on ‘municipal cosmopolitanism’ and 'political leadership' in Latin America, and with collaborator Teddy Cruz, an exhibition on social housing in the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), and a forthcoming exhibion on 'cross-border citizenship' at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum (NYC). They are also co-investigating a Ford Foundation-funded study of citizenship culture in the San Diego-Tijuana border region, in collaboration with the Bogota-based NGO, Corpovisionarios.

From 2013-14 she was a special advisor on civic and urban initiatives to the City of San Diego, and with Teddy Cruz led the development of its Civic Innovation Lab. She presently consults on social and economic rights for the Global Citizenship Commission. From 1999-2001 Forman was Assistant Editor of Political Theory, and is currently Editor of the Adam Smith Review.

Forman is an advocate for deepening university-community research partnerships. She is Vice-Chair of the University of California Climate Solutions Group and co-editor of "Bending the Curve: 10 Scalable Solutions for Carbon and Climate Neutrality" (The University of California report on carbon neutrality). She currently serves on the advisory boards of the Climate Neutrality Task Force, the UC San Diego Global Health Initiative, the Urban Studies and Planning Program, the Global Health major, FF21 (Food and Fuel for the 21st Century) and the Center for Tomorrow’s California.