Teaching Statement

At its best, the anthropology classroom is a place where students collaborate to discover more incisive and complex questions about urgent and material problems in the present. Our commitments to each other in this space are to challenge ourselves through close reading and inquiry, to engage our creative and imaginative capacities in writing and speech, and to contextualize these activities in our observations made in the world. By emphasizing field-based assignments and creative practice in my syllabuses, I communicate that the intellectual labor of critical interpretation, analysis, and writing actually have real stakes in the world and can be used for diverse purposes. 

In my teaching philosophy, accessible approaches can be rigorous and need not be reductive. We need pedagogical approaches that invite students to engage with scholarly debates in a diversity of forms; we also need to take opportunities to celebrate our multidirectional intellectual developments big and small. Mirroring my research with vernacular media, I invite students to think about how their newly-earned insights can integrate into the vernacular formats and genres that they themselves create and consume.