As an instructor, my goal is to offer sociological thinking as a resource to students by emphasizing accessibility. Access, for me, means teaching to the class that shows up and ensuring students can show up by balancing a focus on teaching substantive content with a focus on teaching concrete intellectual skills.
Teaching and student mentorship are key components of my commitment to social justice and inclusion in higher education.
I have taught or have prepared to teach social science courses on each of the following subjects at the undergraduate or graduate level.
Research methods
Through numerous exercises and published examples this course works to teach students the logic of social science research. Specifically, students learn to articulate research questions with literature and questions with appropriate methods and data.
Health and illness
What is “obesity” and why was it an epidemic? This course offers a close examination of medical science, health care, and the construction of disease to better understand how health is articulated with social inequality. Topics range from health insurance to mental health, to disability.
Social theory
Beginning with enlightenment thinkers, this course provides a genealogy of the social sciences in the contemporary United States. It traces European thought traditions that have shaped “the canon” and their historical and contemporary critics whose insights hold great potential. This course provides students with the tools to read theory and articulate research questions with deep scholarly implications.
Race, Gender, and Science
Through three units on nature, health, and culture, this course explicates how the social construction of race, gender, and other forms of human difference has intersected with the trajectory of scientific fields ranging from genetics to epidemiology.
Environmental Inequality
By engaging environmental history, critical ethnic studies, and feminist theories this course will pursue these questions through time and across several case studies, including Chicago. This course provides students with key building blocks to study root causes of environmental inequality in the United States from settler colonialism to EPA regulations.
Sexuality and the Body
This course uses historical invention of sexuality as a construct that can be described, studied, embodied, identified with, and regulated as a way of narrating the history of social science.