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Intersectionality
Religion
Gender
Identity
Postcolonialism
Power
Class
Law
Justice
Race
Feminisms
Culture
Imperialism
Queerness
My teaching addresses, from different angles, the intersectionality of race, class, gender, and ethnicity in the production of political and social hierarchies – linking broader ideas of formal equality with people’s lived realities. In all my classes I make a point of linking broader theoretical concepts to larger political and structural realities in the United States and elsewhere. My pedagogical goal is to enhance students’ understanding of processes of socio-economic marginalization and exclusion and how they translate into social realities that often remain unquestioned.
Courses Taught
Practicing Intersectionality: The Interdisciplinary Study of Race, Gender, and Ethnicity
The courses focuses on the critical study of social difference as an interdisciplinary practice, using texts with diverse modes of argumentation and evidence to analyze social differences as fundamentally entangled and co-produced. In this class, students interrogate the regulatory function of social differentiation in relation to projects of nation–building, population control, and the very definition of politics.
Culture and Personality
This class explores the factors in and the effects of cultural conditioning on the individual and its identity within contested political, social, and economic settings. It examines the major forms of cultural identity, ethnicity, race, and nationalism from an anthropological perspective. Students examine how people create, maintain, and use cultural identities, how social contexts shape their form and content, and how form and content support social relationships. This course offers an extraordinary forum for dialogue among students in Anthropology, Sociology, and Psychology studies.
Introduction to Law and Society
This course introduces students to the scholarly field known as Law & Society. It especially focuses on the ways people attempt to use law for social and political change, and on how social and political forces affect the content of law and people’s access to it in terms of race, class, and gender. Using a variety of approaches, the course examines questions such as how people understand law and how law both limits and empowers people politically. This course lays out the historical and theoretical foundations of the law and society discipline.
Gender and the Law
This interdisciplinary course also draws on feminist and anthropological scholarship so as to investigate the challenges feminist legal scholarship poses to liberal notions of “justice” and “gender equality”. In this course students are confronted with debates regarding legal universalism, essentialism, women’s agency, masculinity and their intersection with class, race, gender, and sexuality. Students in this advanced lecture course consider newspapers, blogs, and documentaries exploring the manner in which the category of gender is configured to meet the discursive needs and fill the stereotype within politically and ideologically contested socio-legal worlds.
Transnational Feminisms
The Transnational Feminisms course explores the gender dynamics of racial, ethnic, and economic relations of power in domestic, international, and transnational settings. It exposes students to feminist scholarship produced by and about American women of color, Third World women, and other social and political actors whose experiences and thinking have shaped contemporary ideas about gender.
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