Teaching

I have been a Graduate Student Instructor for a number of courses at UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley. Syllabi of the courses for which I was the acting instructor are embedded below. I am a proponent of the free sharing of syllabi online as a way of making reading lists more accessible.  

Drawing on my experience with yoga and meditation, I open every class session with 3-5 minutes dedicated to breath-work and somatic practice. In my courses, I encourage reflection on the physical and emotional costs of discussing and researching challenging topics such as colonial violence and non-consent. I support students in finding accommodations and developing sustainable routines to be supported in their academic learning and professional development.  

Firebaugh Scholars Program Research Seminar Part 2

UC Berkeley

Instructor of Record 

Semester: Spring

Offered: 2025

Building upon the content of the Fall semester research seminar, the Spring seminar supported Firebaugh scholars in the practice of conducting original academic research. Topics we covered included engaging in continued library research and literature review, revising proposals, conducting quantitative and qualitative research and analysis, applying theoretical frameworks, and writing a research paper for publication.

Firebaugh Scholars Program Research Seminar Part 1

UC Berkeley

Instructor of Record 

Semester: Fall

Offered: 2024

This seminar introduced scholars to the practice of conducting original academic research. Topics we covered included crafting a research question, engaging in library research, conducting literature review, and composing a research proposal. Firebaugh scholars came from the social sciences, humanities, and sciences with varying degrees of expertise in research. With this in mind, we aimed to make the seminar one that maximized the benefits of diversity within the collective and fostered a sense of community. Firebaugh scholars were undocumented, foster youth, formerly incarcerated, and system impacted students. The Firebaugh Research Seminar and Program aims to increase marginalized students’ access to resources, training, mentorship, and research communities, to promote the representation and support of marginalized students in academic research and graduate school. Firebaugh Scholars applied and were admitted to the program in order to register for the research seminar.

GRAD 219 Research on Racism in Science Mini Course: Colonial Legacies and Experiementation in the Health Sciences

UCSF 

Instructor of Record 

Semester: Spring

Offered: 2024

This mini course on "Colonial Legacies and Experimentation in the Health Sciences" drew on humanities and social sciences texts to consider the ways in which historical and contemporary mobilizations of categories of race were central to medical and scientific understandings of who is (and is not) human. We will thought beyond anthropocentric conceptions of science to also question what it means to treat ethically not only people but also other non-human living beings including biological specimens, animals, and environments. We built on prior course material (UCSF Grad 202) to consider how the biological sciences interface with categories of classification including race, disability, gender, and human. We will discuss the historical background and contemporary significance of these categories of difference, paying special attention to ideas of consent, pain, and agency as they are understood today.

We read texts which reference medical anthropology, de-colonial and post-colonial theory, critical race theory, political ecology, science and technology studies (STS), and Indigenous STS. In week 1, "Consent and Non- Consent: Colonization and Experimentation," we read historical and contemporary sources about how colonial logics of extraction and ownership were foundational to contemporary logics of consent and experimentation. In week 2, "Cycles of Violence and Healing in Western Science," we questioned the ways in which these logics continue to inform the ethics of the health sciences and medicine in the Western world. In week 3, "Inspiration from Post-Colonial Presents, Imagination of Anti-Colonial Futures," we discussed contemporary critiques of Western science, and related responses and interventions.

Anthropology 3AC Introduction to Social/Cultural Anthropology

UC Berkeley

Graduate Student Instructor for Dr. Brian Karl

Semester: Summer

Offered: 2023

This course presents a number of thematic concerns in the history of “doing” anthropology through a series of case studies and disciplinary surveys. These investigate some of the wide range of humans’ responses to conceiving of and organizing themselves in the world. Among problematics to be considered are: what are the effects of such social scientific investigations themselves in political and representational terms even while they are attempting to understand differences among varying groups of humans? In keeping with this course’s status as part of “American Cultures” curricular offerings, human categories such as class, gender, race and sexuality will not be taken as given, but rather examined and questioned for their socially constructed nature as much as for their possible utility for analysis and understanding of the individual, of individuals’ relationships to others, and of perception and comprehension of different human groups and the larger world.

Anthropology 115: Introduction to Medical Anthropology

UC Berkeley

Graduate Student Instructor for Dr. Lawrence Cohen 

Semester: Spring

Offered: 2023

ESPM 162 Social Inequality and the Body: Health, Medicine, Society & Environment

UC Berkeley

Graduate Student Instructor for Dr. Seth Holmes

Semester: Fall

Offered: 2022

This course will provide an overview of key theoretical and methodological approaches as well as central arguments in our understandings of the relationships between social inequality and the body. The course will lend context and highlight concepts that are important to understandings of and movements toward social, health and environmental equity.

This course will introduce students to the intersections of social factors and the body through classic, contemporary and theoretically-informed readings. The course will move from the theory and approaches of medical anthropology, to include insights from environmental anthropology, medical sociology, medical geography, cultural and political ecology, critical food studies, and the social studies of science, technology and the natural environment. Readings, discussions, and writing assignments will explore topics such as social ecology, poverty, healing and caring, and resistance to social, and environmental inequity. Throughout the semester, students will use ethnographic methods to conduct field research on a topic of their choice related to social inequalities and the body. The topic will be explored through multiple angles and through different genres of writing.

This course will engage students by requiring them to:

1) Demonstrate knowledge in major areas of inequality and the body in the social and natural environment in relation to current debates in the social sciences;

2) Apply ethnographic methods (participant observation and interviews) to explore a social and health inequality of interest;

3)   Learn different writing genres: Opinion Editorial, Ethnography, Field Notes, Annotated Bibliography, Review Paper, Graphic writing (see the book, Lissa, as an example)

4) Practice writing ideas and analyses in language that can be broadly understood;

5) Apply sociocultural, political economic, political ecologic, and critical theory frameworks in ethnographic writing.

Rhetoric R1B The Craft of Writing: Care and the Careless Contemporary

UC Berkeley

Instructor of Record

Semester: Spring

Offered: 2022

Care organizes both our sense of self and our sense of reality. Care is enacted by numerous actors, and can be thought of in numerous contexts: anonymous care, in teletherapy, everyday care, between kin and kith, to name a few. In this course, we introduce contemporary memoirs, ethnographic accounts, fictional examples, and theoretical interventions on the limitations of clinical care and political care. For example, care by the state, or in the clinic, may be unable to accommodate a person’s full history and context. We will set off together to attempt to articulate a concept of care that is mindful of how institutions work.

The broader purpose of this course is to develop your critical reading, scholarly writing, and academic research skills, whatever your major might be. Over the semester, you will learn how to research by working through the materials provided regarding the problem space of institutional care. You will formulate your own opinions and claims by being in conversation with contemporary sources, guided by the conventions of research in the humanities and interdisciplinary social sciences. We’ll study the summary and synthesis of materials we read, the construction of logical and persuasive arguments, the conveying of attitudes and information. You’ll learn by practicing these skills, by thinking about and talking about your own efforts and those of your fellow students, by writing and revising, and by analyzing the work of other writers.

This course offers contemporary sources from authors who situate themselves in the fields of Indigenous STS, queer feminist STS, queer-of-color critique, critical disability studies, and critical black thought. We will utilize these texts as sources through which to practice the skills of research, such as drawing conclusions, developing claims, and intervening in discourse. Together, we will research towards a care concept that is institutional but may not succumb to the violence of recognition or the problematics of ableist conceptions of health and wellness. We will also work together to try and figure out why ethnographies of care so often return to the family, to the everyday, and to love.

Geography 10AC Worldings: People, Regions, and States

UC Berkeley

Graduate Student Instructor for Dr. Jake Kosek

Semester: Fall

Offered: 2021

This course is designed to transform how you think about, understand, and engage in the making and remaking of the worlds we inhabit. Stories central to Geography pepper the pages of newspapers almost every day – in the conditions and relations of racism, immigration policies, international finance capital, the military industry, genetic engineering, global warming, natural disasters, surveillance, poverty and terrorism. Within these stories and events underlying concepts central to the field of geography such as empire, space, nature, dispossession animate the lived histories and politics of their contemporary manifestation in the U.S. and the world. Our approach will not be to simply learn about the regions of the world, but to think critically and geographically about how regions, peoples, states, and other foundational concepts have come into being, the consequences of their formations, and how they might be otherwise. The unifying theme of the class is the contested relations, practices, and processes in the making of these central geographic concepts (empire, space, nature, and dispossession) that often go unexamined.  

Starting with the concept of Empire as a general framing of both the discipline or Geography and a set of ongoing relations that both shape and condition our everyday lives. Next we the renderings of space, such as the world, the region, and the nation-state, we will examine the politics and power of space not as an empty stage upon which events happen but as a deeply contested field with specific histories and profound consequences. This course will take the map seriously by learning the empirical order of our day via map quizzes throughout the semester. However, we will also seek to disrupt the map’s authority at objectively representing space and to disrespect its seeming fixity by exploring some of the politics of the broader concepts of spatial production and representation. Second, we will examine the idea of nature, both as a concept of the external environment and also as an internal essence such as human nature. We will look at the work that ideas of nature have in our lives from our understandings of the global environment, to our most intimate formations of race, culture, and ethnicity. Ultimately, we hope to demonstrate how the concept of nature, that is often presented as the opposite of that which is social and political, is anything but. The third section of the class deals with dispossession and global inequalities related to globalization.  Here we will discuss modern disparities between and within regions, nations, states and communities. We will begin this section by studying economic globalization starting with its imperial histories and component parts such as property, the commodity, and labor; and then explore the processes and institutions that have shaped the modern form of global production and exchange and the contemporary consequences of these formations.  We will then raise key geographical questions about the politics of indigeneity, race, and sexuality and how political economy and identity become intertwined in powerful and consequential ways.