My classroom is a collaborative and challenging space where students are personally at ease and intellectually on their toes.
My pedagogy centers on…
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Denaturalizing Assumptions
Students enter the classroom with complex identities and as the authorities on their own experience. My goal is to provide them with the tools to self-examine and reassess their assumptions about others and the world.
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Facilitating Critique
My courses use history to help us to better understand the present. I also structure courses around foundational concepts like power, race, law, resistance, and freedom to create a shared vocabulary and framework for critique.
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Imagining Alternatives
For me, the project of critique is always a springboard to envision the world anew. The classroom is a space for students to be daring, imaginative, and transgressive.
Here are some sample courses I’ve taught.
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From Slavery to Prisons
I developed this course in 2017 and it changed my scholarly trajectory. Students chart the development of prisons from slave courts and slave patrols to the War on Drugs. We then explore the forms of resistance that Black citizens have undertaken in challenging those developments.
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Introduction to American Politics
This course provides a broad survey of the American political system. Students learn about not only key topics like the three branches, but also the foundational role of slavery and settler colonialism, as well as participation and democracy.
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Law, Politics, and Society
What is law? Students explore this question through foundational texts in sociolegal studies. Central themes include rights, legal consciousness, law and violence, race, social change, immigration, and imperialism.
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Concepts of Power
What is power? Students explore this questions by engaging with an array of modern and contemporary political thinkers including Machiavelli, Rousseau, Marx, Ture & Hamilton, Foucault, and Arendt.
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Rights, Liberties, and Justice
This course explores the role of rights and liberties in American jurisprudence and constitutional development from the twentieth century to today. Students will learn how the Court has addressed issues around speech, religion, criminal procedure, detention and internment, reproductive rights, and marriage.
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Critical Race Studies
This course surveys key concepts and foundational histories in critical race studies. Students study the varied experiences of different racial groups to explore concepts like settler colonialism, Latinidad, double consciousness, whiteness, interracial politics, intersectionality, and multiracial identity.