My teaching builds on the anthropological mantra of making the strange familiar and the familiar strange to introduce students to critical perspectives on the world. I firmly believe that anthropology’s holistic, interdisciplinary, global, and experience-near epistemological approach is uniquely positioned to address complex contemporary problems. My experience teaching both large and small, introductory and advanced, anthropology courses has confirmed this conviction, while helping me innovate on inclusive, student-centered, and community-based pedagogical techniques.
Asylum: Finding Refuge in a Bordered World
In a bordered world, those placed outside its borders are often denied their rights, dehumanized, and even killed with impunity. This course surveys the broad literature on “asylum” to examine how our bordered world came to be, and how those at humanity’s edges seek and often fail to find asylum. Putting qualitative research in anthropology and sociology into conversation with social and political theory, history, geography, investigative journalism, literature, and film, the course conceptualizes asylum in two key ways: (1) a fundamental political right of persecuted, displaced, and stateless people, and (2) institutions of sanctuary, captivity, and escape (e.g., mental asylums, prisons, maroon communities, zoos, etc.) What remains of “the human” when people no longer have “a right to have rights”? What does a world where the stateless are systematically persecuted do to our common humanity? How did the political right of asylum develop historically and what explains its demise today? Who deserves asylum, and how do contemporary regimes of asylum rely on and reproduce hierarchies of humanity that make certain lives matter more than others? What is a border, and how can we think of institutions of asylum as forming symbolic boundaries between those considered fully human and dehumanized others? How do persecuted people seek asylum beyond the exclusionary regimes of asylum available to them? Addressing these difficult ethical and political questions, this course asks us to consider how we are all inevitably entangled in complex formations of violence at a global scale, and what a different, more equal, and less violent world might look like.
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“I felt as though I was in an environment where even my immediate, still forming thoughts could be shared [. . .] The way in which the instructors managed to weave together seemingly unrelated topics [. . .] into a cohesive, coherent course made this class one to remember for the ages”
“The topic of this course was something that was completely out of my usual realm of study [. . .] I felt as though I learned a lot about a topic that I see coming up again and again in the news and in real life.”
“I found it very fruitful that there was no prescribed “end goal” [. . .] there was ample latitude to reach one’s own conclusions about the material. The most important thing I felt was that you two were learning along with us—both in how to instruct this course, and from our discussions [. . .]”
“It has been a tough year, but this has been one of the most thought provoking courses I’ve taken in my undergraduate career.”
“I feel that I have learned so much about something I really care about deeply.”
Psyche: Culture and Power
How does the world shape our minds? Organized around this central question, this course examines how cultural milieus, social structures, and historical contexts have shaped the thoughts, feelings, and desires of people living in different times and places. Have people always and everywhere felt anger? How does speaking different languages shape how we sense the world? Where Western psychiatric diagnoses are absent or insufficient, how is “mental illness” interpreted and experienced? How do unequal economic and political systems shape our psyches, and our very understanding of how the psyche operates?
To examine the question of the relation between mind and world, this course puts psychological anthropology into conversation with social and cultural psychology, history, social theory, philosophy, and film. Drawing on this variety of sources and our own diverse subjective experiences, we collaboratively and critically examine two key themes: social, cultural, and historical variations across domains of psychological life such as consciousness, cognition, emotion, memory, dreams, and mental illness; and the impact that common but deeply unequal global systems of power such as colonialism and capitalism have on people’s subjectivity around the world. In this way, the course invites you to begin imagining what a “liberation psychology” that is attentive to both cultural difference and power might look like.
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Humans Past, Present, and Future:
Introduction to Anthropology
Think of a short sentence, any sentence, and say it out loud. Then, repeat this sentence and try hearing your own words as if they belonged to a foreign language, as if they were a string of meaningless sounds. You probably found this simple exercise remarkably difficult: you probably found yourself automatically assigning meaning to your words and struggled hearing your own voice as someone who does not know your language might hear it. As humans, we seem to have a lot of difficulty hearing, seeing, registering, and ultimately understanding the world outside of culturally specific frameworks of meaning that we each inherit according to the time and place we were born in. We are led to believe that the meaning we find in our language and in the world is “natural” or “universal,” and we lose sight of the fact that it is just one of an infinite variety of ways of understanding the world. The challenge of anthropology is precisely to become aware of the culturally specific frameworks of meaning that make possible but also limit our understanding of the world, and its promise is to learn how to understand the world otherwise.
This course will introduce you to key debates within the field of anthropology across its four classic domains of inquiry—culture (or cultural anthropology), language (or linguistic anthropology), history (or historical anthropology and archaeology), and biology (or biological anthropology)—with a focus on cultural anthropology. A broad survey of the “four fields” of anthropology, this course will ask you to consider these and other big questions: How can we account for human biological variation beyond socially constructed frameworks of race? Have we always been unequal? Do people who speak different languages think and sense the world differently? When did the notion of two complementary genders (men and women) emerge culturally and historically, and what other social organizations of gender are possible?