TEACHING
COURSES TAUGHT - Selection
Abolitionist Dreams & Everyday Resistance Freedom Memoirs, Liberation Struggles and Decolonizing Justice
Spring 2020 // Fall 2018
Sissies, Studs and Butches: Racialized Masculinities, Effeminacy and Embodiments of Noncompliance
Transforming Justice and Truth to Power: Methodologies/Methods in Participatory Action Research to Community Accountability
Fall 2019 / Spring 2018
Entangled Sexuality: Violence, Resistance, Crime, Punishment and Survival
Trans* Identities and Communities: Genealogy, Theory, Praxis and Community Research
Fall 2017
Introduction to Gender Studies: Transnationalism & State Power
Winter 2017
Theories in Asian American Studies: Intersectionality, Feminism and Transnationalism
2016
This upper-division seminar will offer close theoretical readings of a variety of abolitionist, anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, insurgent and feminist-of-color memoir, autobiographical and social justice texts, exploring the themes of abolitionist vision, praxis and everyday resistance. We will read works from feminist revolutionaries and activists such as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Assata Shakur, Patrisse Cullors, Grace Lee Boggs, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna- Samarsinna, Kai Cheng Thom, Angela Davis, adrienne maree brown, Suheir Hammad and others. We will center the interlinking and capacious concepts of liberation, revolution, freedom, justice and decolonization. How might these many struggles, as theorized through these various texts, be unapologetically and dynamically intertwined through themes such as love and transformation?
This upper-division seminar will investigate the racialization of masculinity (the masculinization of race) as undergirded by heteropatriarchy, settler colonialism, militarized borders and imperialism. This course will challenge Western, hegemonic and inherent legacies of masculinity as modernity's (hu)man. Using critical race theory, feminist, queer/trans* of color critique (e.g., Wynter, Fanon, David Eng, José Muñoz), we will ask how whiteness (white supremacist masculinity) shapes and colors masculinity -- whether as exemplar, visible, illegible, failed, deviant and even toxic -- and what then falls outside of such a frame?
Instructor, Gender Studies & Critical Social Thought, Mount Holyoke College
This course will offer an overview of select methodologies and methods from Community-based research, Participatory Action Research (PAR), collaborative ethnography and other social justice research interventions such as radical oral history, grassroots research collectives, experimental digital archives, research and data justice networks and organizations. We will center questions of "accountability"; that is, to whom, for whom, and to what end do processes of accountability serve those already in power? Moreover, we will investigate the seeming chasms between academia and activism in order to explore the possibility of unlikely collaborative research alliances.
Instructor, Gender Studies & Critical Social Thought, Mount Holyoke College
Instructor, Department of Gender Studies & Critical Social Thought, Mount Holyoke College
Instructor, Department of Gender Studies & Critical Social Thought, Mount Holyoke College
Instructor, Department of Ethnic Studies, University of California, Riverside.
Introduction to Gender, Race and Class
Summer 2016
Co-Instructor, Department of Ethnic Studies, University of California, Riverside.
Transmedia: Community-Engagement Research Project
2013-2014
Instructor, Department of Media & Cultural Studies, University of California, Riverside.
Sexuality, Resistance, Crime and Punishment
2016
Sexuality is often discussed as a thing unto itself. In law, sexuality is largely addressed an conceived of as a singular identity axis of its own, existing independently of other identities, conditional categories and social phenomena. This course will challenge such typified understandings of sexuality as an exceptional place-marker of difference through the study of theorist Jasbir Puar's use of sexual exceptionalism and sexual citizenship alongside Michele Foucault's discussion of the biopolitical, that is how steate exercises sovereignty and power over populations through a mutual dependence. We will discuss an array of critical race theory that studies the contemporary phenomena of sexual citizenship against sexual criminality, where both exist as highly racialized, class-stratifying, (trans)nationalized, and surveilled processes.
Theories in Asian American Studies
Summer 2016
This course will critically investigates core theoretical arguments about the site and field of Asian American studies, its function/resistance in the university and the political global world, and at its inception an unapologetic political project inextricably tied to the field of ethnic studies, “third world solidarity” and as a site of relation and affinity to Black, indigenous and Latinx social justice movements and radical thought in and outside the university. We will study the ways in which "canonization" and "institutionalization" have impacted and created new challenges in AAS as a field and site of resistance of past, present and future. We will study the relation and role AAS has to the growing call for "diversity" in the US, and in which ways the field might create alternative logics and modes of doing and thinking that does not become inured by a post-racial discourse. We will conclude to examine how burgeoning fields like Pacific Islander Studies, South East Asian studies, Arab American studies, Middle Eastern studies, mixed race studies, refugee studies, diaspora studies, queer/trans of color critique and transnational studies (and many more) create a moving and dynamic intervention that forces traditional notions of AAS to move and been transformed.
Women, Queer and Trans* of Color Genealogies: Theories, Practices and Community Research
Women/Queer/Trans* of Color Genealogies (WQToC, respectively: WoC, QoC, ToC) focuses on the knowledge and cultural production produced by communities multiply marginalized by categories of race, gender, sexuality, class, ability, citizenship and location. We will explore the overlaps and tensions between and internal to “women of color”, “queer of color” and “trans* of color” communities through nontraditional multimedia archives of affect, grief, desire, loss, belonging/unbelonging, performativity, love, liberation, contradictions and identitarian politics. The course is not intended to give any complete archive of such genealogies, rather, it will be an exploration of how such counter genealogies provoke other-worldly analyses and ways of relating to power, feeling, futurity and memory/memorialization. This syllabus provides a curated selection of works, and is not a survey of all WQToC works, rather this course 2 is intending to provoke critical dialogue with these select texts in order to build a framework for further investigation for upper-division courses in the program of Gender and Women’s Studies.