Classrooms have the potential to be transformative spaces. New knowledges and ways of knowing are produced when individuals come together to collectively create a truly empowering dialogic space. I aim to establish such an environment in my classrooms. As an educator, my ultimate goal is to equip my students with the necessary skills to be critical witnesses and eventually active agents. This means facilitating, not only understanding of course material, but developing students’ ability to ask questions and weigh how to best answer those questions while considering the nuances of the various realities of diverse individuals. I am committed to improving the classrooms I lead in order to meet the needs of students that work with me and ensure that no matter their background or path forward they leave feeling more empowered in their academic identities.
Instructor of Record
Racing Research: The evolution and impact of racial understanding in the U.S. social sciences (Spring 2022)
What do we mean when we talk race in the United States? Understandings of race in the contemporary U.S. have evolved significantly from rationales of biological determinism to a more modern understanding of race as a social construct. In this course, students will explore the evolution of the science of/study of race. We will grapple with the social reality of race and racism in order to consider the implications of how we have chosen and continue to choose to racialize various populations in the U.S. That is, how does the way we present race in our studies influence the way that greater society understands and engages race and racial categories. We will consider questions such as: How have our scientific understandings of race changed the way we study and make meaning of racial categories? How do studies of racial categories and the ways we operationalize them impact our perception of racialized bodies? What does it mean to take race as an object, a static variable to be considered, versus as a subject, or the central substance, of study? What are the social and political implications of racialized research? What do we mean when we say race and how is it related to racism?
We will approach these questions from an interdisciplinary perspective considering racial ideologies from across the social sciences in order to reflect on how racial categorization and understanding in the social sciences have impacted mainstream discussions of race and racism.
Power, Identity & Resistance | University of Chicago Social Science Core (Winter 2020)
This quarter will center questions of political economy, capitalism, power, and modernity. Through this quarter’s readings we will learn about the organization of economic processes and the ways they relate to social relations in the United States. We will engage in conversation about topics such as exchange, markets, the division of labor, cooperation, capitalism, class, distribution of resources, income, freedom, exploitation, production, growth, domination, slavery and the possibility for progress. From these conversations, we will come to consider capitalism’s role in the construction and establishment of modern structures and hierarchies, the possibility/effects of viewing capitalism as a global concept, as well as how to imagine futures that reduce human suffering and improve the human condition.
Teaching Assistant
2021
Research Practice Partnerships in Education | Education and Society Program
Instructor: Elaine Allensworth
2020
Prelude to the Race Core: Past and Past in Present Racial Formation
Instructor: Micere Keels
2019 & 2020
Introduction to Human Development | Department of Comparative Human Development
Instructors: Sevda Numanbayraktaroglu (2020), Eugene Raikhel (2019)
2019
Why do I go to School?: The History and Meaning of Schooling in America | Collegiate Scholars Program @ UChicago
Instructor: Cheryl Richardson
2019
Power, Identity & Resistance | University of Chicago Social Science Core
Instructors: Robert Vargas (Winter), Aaron Benanav (Spring)