About

Adora is a doctoral candidate in Yale’s joint PhD program in Sociology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her interdisciplinary sociology bridges interests in gender, sexuality, power, and various forms of capital. In her research, she investigates experiences at the nexus of attachment, pleasure, and structure. Her dissertation uses qualitative methods to examine the intimate lives of elite professionals (ages 24-40) without children. This work explores relational dynamics as they are interlinked with labor, desire, and class distinction. Adora is also the coordinator of Yale's Institution for Social and Policy Studies’ Graduate Policy Fellowship and a co-facilitator of the Gender Work reading group (supported by the Whitney Humanities Center). Her work has been published in Cultural Sociology, Post45, and the San Francisco Chronicle. In addition, Adora has extensive experience in the technology non-profit field; prior to Yale, she was at the Wikimedia Foundation, and was a Visiting Fellow at the AI Now Institute in 2024.

Research Areas: Sex & Gender; Sexualities; Economic Sociology; Culture; Science, Knowledge, and Technology

Fields of Interest: Feminist and Queer Theory, Elites, Status, Intimate Life, Work, Reproduction, Contemporary Literature and Literary Publics

If you would like to get in touch, please email adora dot svitak [at] yale.edu.

Advocacy and Public Writing

Adora began delivering writing workshops at local schools after publishing a collection of short stories as a child. Later, she began advocating for student voice at conferences for K-12 educators. In 2010, she delivered the speech “What Adults Can Learn from Kids” at TED. The speech has received more than 5 million views on TED.com alone, and been translated into more than 40 different languages. Her passion for amplifying the voices of youth led her to organize a team of students to produce a TEDx event for youth, TEDxRedmond. Pacific Standard Magazine called Adora one of the "30 Top Thinkers Under 30" and "an activist for feminism, liberal politics, and youth-oriented causes [...] pretty far up the road to becoming intellectual royalty." In 2020, she edited a collected volume of youth activist speeches, Speak Up! (Quarto).​ Adora's audiences have included leaders in education as well as the non-profit, corporate, and public service sectors (e.g., Mashable Social Good Summit, Google, Genentech, Keller Williams, Sun Microsystems, and the United Nations Economic and Social Council). Media outlets including NPR, CNBC, Pacific Standard, Mashable, and others have written about her work.