Teaching

As an instructor, I bring my research interests in affect, politics, and minoritarian cultural production into the classroom by designing courses around one of the most human desires—to belong. My syllabi centralize a diverse set of voices, requiring students to investigate the perspectives of racial, gender, and sexual minorities whose public, academic, activist, and artistic texts challenge dominant narratives of belonging. As students consider who gets to belong, who decided on those rules, and how these rules change based on context, they must often, simultaneously, investigate their beliefs and lived experiences. I make space for this kind of reflection by incorporating writing assignments that give students credit for taking time to consider how their courses are influencing them as students, scholars, activists, leaders, and community members. In this way, my classroom becomes the site of multiple disorienting and, hopefully, exhilarating experiences that will provide students with the vocabulary, conceptual and theoretical knowledge, and historical context to bring their academic skillset into their daily lives.