Pedagogy

My deep and abiding mission as an educator is not to dictate what the answers are, but to provide a set of intellectual and methodological tools to enable students to ask different questions. Through focusing on questions rather than answers, I strive, in my own small way, to live up to the exhortation of bell hooks to teach as a vehicle of liberation.

I do not, of course, always get it right. But I do keep trying.

Want to hear more about my approach to teaching? Listen to a podcast (episode 17) on Leading Lines: A Podcast on Educational Technology where I talk about how I use technology to align with my mission as an educator.

Interested in an example of student-produced, public facing work? Check out The Corona Time Capsule Project, a collection of ephemera, reflections, and images that my students in “The Illness of Others: Epidemics and the Politics of Blame” created in the fall semester of 2020.

Selected Courses

The Illness of Others: Epidemics and the politics of Blame

What is the relationship between illness, epidemics, and blame? What are the links between our experience today and historical epidemic outbreaks of typhus, cholera, tuberculosis, and HIV? In the winter of 2020, we witnessed the emergence and spread of a novel coronavirus. Alongside the movement of the virus, we watched the circulation of narratives of who was to blame. While the virus is novel, the politics of blame are not. In this course, we consider how who we blame is less about epidemiology, and more about pre-existing lines of exclusion.

Seminar: Gender at Work in Health Care

How do we employ gender to distinguish between expert medical work, skilled nursing work, and unskilled caregiving work? How are these distinctions related to inequality for both patients and providers? This seminar explores gender as an organizing principle for how we understand the experience of working in health care, our ideas of what constitutes that work, and the identities of those that perform that work. Through attention to the work that gender does in a variety of health care locations, we will think critically about how gender shapes the experience of both workers and patients.

Contemporary Social Issues: Urban Life, Urban Inequality

What is the relationship between impersonal, structural forces and personal, individual-level decisions? As individuals, we have the freedom to choose how we behave, think, and to some extent, who we are. Despite this freedom, we often choose to behave, think, and form identities in conformity with the people around us. While this patterned conformity is sometimes achieved by threat of punishment, it more often happens by consent: we agree to these collective behaviors, thoughts, and identities because we perceive them as right or legitimate. What are the social processes through which this legitimacy is achieved? Whose interests are served through these processes and whose interests are not? In this introduction to sociology, we will consider these questions in relationship to the reproduction of social inequality in the landscape of the American city.

Society and Medicine/The Sociology of Medicine

How can sociology help us to better understand the scientific facts of disease or the economic calculations of health care? This course will provide a conceptual and substantive overview of the sociological approach to these issues. During the course, we will reflect on the experience of patients, the practices of their providers, and the influence of social structure on both.

First Year Writing Seminar: Medical Controversies

What does writing have to do with thinking? This course is a writing seminar grounded in the sociological perspective. Rather than just surveying various controversial issues, we will consider a set of fundamental, analytical questions such as how an issue becomes a controversy, the role of social institutions, culture, and the media in shaping how we understand these controversies, and how these issues intersect with larger conversations about social inequality and ethical behavior in medicine. In this course, the work of reading, writing, and analytical thinking are intertwined—in much the same ways as they are outside the classroom.

The Sociology of Gender

How does gender organize everyday life? This course will explore gender as an organizing principle for how we understand the experience of working, our conceptions of what constitutes work, and our identities as workers.  We will look at “gender at work” from the macro-perspective of labor markets, to the micro-view of the corporate office and the family home. Through attention to the work of gender in a variety of locations, we will develop our sociological understanding of gender’s role in shaping everyday experience.

The Sociology of Race and Ethnicity

If race is not a simple biological inheritance, then what is it? This course is designed to introduce students to how sociologists understand race and ethnicity. We will cover concepts, theories, and evidence for understanding both the historical and contemporary meanings of race and ethnicity in US society. We will also survey the key social institutions that reproduce social differences along racial and ethnic lines.