Teaching
My teaching begins from the conviction that rigorous intellectual work is relational. I seek to create classrooms in which sustained engagement with difficult ideas builds trust among students and between students and instructor, while inviting students to develop a more reflective relationship to their own experiences, assumptions, and intellectual commitments. Through careful contextualization, structured discussion, and attentive mentorship, I aim to cultivate a genuine intellectual community in which students learn with and from one another.
Introducing Social Justice
This course introduces students to competing traditions of justice and asks: Who defines justice? How is injustice reproduced? What does meaningful social change require? Students place liberal, Marxist, feminist, and Indigenous approaches in conversation with struggles over race, gender, labor, sexuality, migration, national privilege, and colonialism. Through scholarly texts, film, student-led discussions, and a semester-long collaborative project that moves from diagnosing injustice to proposing action, students learn to situate arguments historically, identify the assumptions and exclusions within competing frameworks, and develop their own positions on justice and social change.
Political Sociology
This is an upper-level seminar examining how power operates through—and beyond—formal political institutions. The course places mainstream political sociology in sustained conversation with critical approaches that center race, empire, colonialism, and global inequality, asking what different theoretical traditions illuminate and obscure. Moving from foundational theories of power to nationalism, empire, citizenship, policy, policing, and alternative political futures, students practice close reading and comparative analysis. Through student-facilitated seminars, reflective essays, and a “Two Lenses” project, they learn to apply competing frameworks to contemporary political problems and develop their own analytical voices.
Introducing Sociology
This course begins with a foundational question: How are individual lives shaped by—and how do they, in turn, shape—society? Students develop the sociological imagination through the study of socialization, classical and critical theory, and research methods, then use these tools to investigate how race, class, gender, sexuality, colonialism, and empire organize inequality. The course also turns sociology’s lens on the discipline itself, asking how its canon was constructed and how Du Boisian, feminist, transnational, and postcolonial perspectives change what sociology can see. Through analytical exercises, student-led discussions, and a collaborative explainer project, students learn to connect personal experience to social structure, evaluate competing explanations, and communicate sociological arguments clearly.
U.S. In The World
U.S. in the World examines how the United States has been made through its relationships with other peoples, territories, and political projects. Treating claims about global leadership, security, sovereignty, and liberation as questions , students consider both the promises and uneven consequences of U.S. power. The course moves from the international influence of the Declaration of Independence, the New Deal, public-health campaigns, and economic interdependence to Indigenous dispossession, settler colonialism, racial statecraft, militarization, and occupation, before turning to anticolonial resistance and decolonial futures. Through sociology, history, film, poetry, fiction, and structured reflection, students develop historically grounded interpretations of U.S. power and the worlds made in relation to it.