TEACHING

I teach courses in anthropology, writing, quantitative methods, museum studies, art history, critical identity studies, and environmental studies. The act of teaching can either reproduce or interrogate and re-invent our disciplines. In my classroom, both students and I are together generating and questioning knowledge through multi-directional learning. Influenced by Paulo Freire and bell hooks’s critical pedagogies, I approach teaching as a recursive learning process in which educators must constantly re-assess how we know what is "good teaching".

I begin the semester with critical discussions of epistemologies and situated knowledge. We evaluate how anthropology and other disciplines have formed within the societies in which practitioners have been enculturated: as a result, though anthropologists value anti-colonial and anti-racist approaches to humans, the discipline has been complicit in exclusionary and marginalizing practices. I design courses that make the field's development transparent and which position anthropology as a case study in knowledge production. Student work and assessment emphasize public writing, quantitative literacy, and multimodal writing about enduring social problems and their interventions. Courses are organized by: (1) method and theory contextualized historically and politically, (2) case studies on urgent social concerns, (3) student research using the social scientist’s toolkit, and (4) public engagement with and dissemination of knowledge for different audiences.