Teaching

Current & Upcoming Courses at the University of Toronto:

Fall 2018

HLTD53 Special Topics in Health Humanities: Documentary and Memoir for Health Humanities. Tuesdays 4-6pm.

Memoir writing and documentary media offer an important way for people to share personal stories about experiences of health and care. In this course, we explore memoirs of physicians and patients, documentary films by people with autism, plays about undiagnosed illness, writing about global experiences of disaster, and more. We analyze writing, film, and performance to draw conclusions about what makes a documentary voice compelling. We will consider ethical concerns of documentary practice and interrogate the line between truth and fiction. Students have the option to create an original creative work as a final project.

ANT 6032H – Graduate Research Seminar in Anthropology (St George Campus) – Disability Anthropology. Wednesday 4-6pm.

This advanced graduate research seminar foregrounds the interplay of theory and method in interrogating what it means to study disability from a sociocultural anthropological perspective. Reading recent works in the field, we will consider how ethnographers theorize disability and debility in terms of medicalization, normal/abnormal/queer, mobility, infrastructure, kinship, care, identity and agency, global capitalism and productive labor, the welfare state, decoloniality and radical alterity, digital communication, and human rights and NGOs. Our readings will address a variety of types disability – sensory, motor, mental – and the specific concerns that each raise, and will engage with a diversity of global geographic, cultural, and political locations. Throughout the term, we will work to stake out the breadth of contemporary disability anthropology, an emerging subfield entwined with both queer and medical anthropology, informed by critical disability studies, yet distinct in its ethical-methodological concerns. The course is particularly suited to graduate students who are interested in an ethnographic approach to making sense of disability as difference in social worlds.

Winter 2019

HLTC52 Special Topics in Health Humanities: Global Disability Studies. Thursdays 1-3pm.

This course takes a critical approach to understanding how the category of disability works globally. Starting from a decolonial approach, we will use an integrated social science and humanities approach to understand disability and ableism in global context. Through ethnography, novels, films, and other media, we encounter disability as a relational social experience across diverse locations in China, Kyrgyzstan, the Czech Republic, India, Australia, Africa, and North America. Students will be challenged to consider the manifold social processes by which multiple kinds of bodily difference are stigmatized, and the uneasy relationship of disability studies to the pathologizing practices of medical care and public health.

Past Teaching:

Critical Human Rights and Global Postsocialism. RSEE 365 01 / ANTH460 & ANTH 549 / E&RS 531. Spring 2018. Yale University.

Course Flyer for Critical Human Rights and Global Postsocialism, Yale Unviersity Spring 2017. Small Image of a 1962Soviet Globalism poster showing people of different ethnic backgrounds hands held and raised in front of a globe, with the words Peace! Friendship! in Russian in red text. Followed by course description: his new advanced seminar considers Human Rights and Socialism as modernist, utopian visions for global justice in human society. In the late 20thcentury, socialist visions for justice in the future lost ground, as the doctrine of human rights was put forth by many as a standard bearer for checks on justice across political territories. This course traces the variety of critical approaches that scholars have taken to the problem of human rights, with a focus on ethnography and sociocultural anthropology, or how human rights actually function in daily life. Emphasizing postsocialism, this course foregrounds the so-called second world (Russia, China, and other post/socialist countries) and the global impact of socialism as a moral doctrine for justice. Students write a term paper in which they focus in on either a region or a topic (disability rights, LGBTQ rights, right to education, humanitarian medical intervention, etc). Students are encouraged to develop their own point of view about human rights as transnational humanitarian legal policy and political philosophy. Suitable for students with an interest in Postsocialism and Socialism, Sociocultural/Medical Anthropology, Human Rights and Humanitarianism, and regional interests related to Russia, Eastern and Central Europe, China, and other socialist and postsocialist regions.

Critical Human Rights and Global Postsocialism. RSEE 365 01 / ANTH460 & ANTH 549 / E&RS 531. Spring 2018. Yale University.

Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Russia: Ethnography and Social Theory. Anthropology 325/Women’s Gender & Sexuality Studies 327/Euro&Russian Studies 532. Fall 2017. Yale University.

Queer & Crip Theory (CGS 102). Program in Critical Gender Studies. Summer Session 2017. University of California, San Diego.

Performance and Cultural Studies (COMM 111P). Department of Communication. Spring Quarter 2017. University of California, San Diego.

Ethnography in Practice (ANSC 173). Department of Anthropology. Spring Quarter 2017. University of California, San Diego.

The Problem of Voice (COMM 127). Department of Communication. Winter Quarter 2017. University of California, San Diego.

“UNITAS” – a year-long course on diversity & democracy, and ethnography as a social justice practice (ANTH 92 and ANTH 93). Department of Anthropology. Fall 2013-Spring 2014; Fall 2014-Spring 2015. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.