Teaching

🗒️ Syllabi available upon request! 

Infrastructure (Fall 2025)

Infrastructure is any system that enables the movement or connection of people and things. While often conceived in material, technical terms–think pipes, roads, and wires–infrastructure can also exist in the form of labor and relationships. While infrastructure supports much of our day-to-day existence, infrastructure is often invisible until something goes wrong. How have different societies organized infrastructure, and how in turn does infrastructure organize people? In this reading lab we will explore how questions about the workings of infrastructure are also questions about power. We will ground our discussions by looking together at many different examples of infrastructural politics, from the Flint water crisis to the data centers that fuel rising technologies like Chat GPT. This lab is a great option for students in any major interested in deepening their understanding of technology, environment, or politics through a humanistic and critical lens.

Geographies of Crisis (Spring 2025)

Crisis has become increasingly ordinary in contemporary life: wildfires, wars, and collapse fill the headlines, and still other crises happen in slow motion, in stigmatized or neglected places that we may not even notice. All over the world, people react to, resist, ignore, suffer from, triumph over, and otherwise live with crisis in their daily lives. And some people are far more affected by crisis than others, due to systemic inequalities of class, race, gender, disability, and more. 

Anthropology–the study of human cultures and the meaning people make out of their lives–opens the door to expanding our understanding of crisis beyond common attitudes such as panic or pity. The goal of this class is to begin accumulating a wider awareness of the tremendously diverse possibilities humans are capable of when dwelling in geographies troubled by economic, environmental, and political instabilities. The class begins by grounding students in an interdisciplinary vocabulary of space and place, and then continues on to compare different ways crisis can be spatially imagined (for example, from afar versus from within, at home versus at a distance).

Introduction to the Anthropology of Science and Technology (Fall 2024)

This course will introduce students to central concepts and questions in the anthropology of science and technology. The goal of this course is to understand how science and technology reflect particular histories, places, and groups. Anthropology is a social science that seeks to closely observe and interpret culture, with a special interest in highlighting the mundane or taken-for-granted aspects of life to create highly detailed and holistic accounts of human societies in all their diversity. Using anthropology to look at science and technology expands our capacity for critical thinking, because the social and cultural aspects of science and technology are often masked by claims to disinterestedness, objectivity, and nature. This class explores the role of rituals, language, power, race, gender, and economy in realms such as physics, biology, machines, laboratories, medicine, algorithms, and more.

Anthropology of Global Racism (Spring 2024, Spring 2025)

This course is an introduction to sociocultural and linguistic anthropological approaches to understanding race and racism. We will read ethnographic research about how race as a category becomes locally meaningful and shapes peoples’ everyday lives and relationships. We will also look at approaches that seek to understand how these local meanings are tied to global political and economic systems. Readings address and compare the construction of race, ethnicity, and Otherness across a global range of contexts, including diversity initiatives, psychiatry, science, romance, food systems, sociolinguistics, racial capitalism, health disparities, and more.

Science in Action: Technologies and Controversies in Everyday Life (Fall 2023)

When controversies about science and technology emerge, they bring to light points of friction between science, society and politics. In this course, we study a range of such controversies and explore disagreements about the role of technology, the nature of scientific research, and the place of politics in science. Each class explores a different ongoing debate around topics such as drugs, nuclear weapons, GMOs, artificial intelligence, health, animals, the influence of gender and race on scientific research, conflicts of expertise and trust, and more. By examining such controversies before they come to be resolved, we discover science and technology in action, in a dynamic relation with social life and cultural ideas, changing them and in turn, being changed by them. 

Anthropology of the Environment (Fall 2023)

This course provides an overview of intellectual debates in Environmental Anthropology across the 20th and 21st centuries, with an emphasis on the shifting human place in nature amidst our current epoch of global ecological crises. The conceptual topics are wide-ranging and include the Western cultural idea of pure nature; the practice of ethnography; how the material world influences culture; human adaptation and environmental determinism; resource extraction and capitalist natures; species extinction and biodiversity; and environmental racism and justice. This entry-level course grounds students in the key terms and debates of anthropology and social theory, while critically interrogating popular ideas such as resilience and sustainability.