Teaching

Current & Upcoming Courses at the University of Toronto:

Fall 2019

HLTB50H3F – Introduction to Health Humanities

An introduction to human health through literature, narrative, and the visual arts. Students will develop strong critical skills in text-centered methods of analysis (i.e., the written word, visual images) through topics including representations of health, illness narratives, death and dying, patient-professional relationships, technoscience and the human body. UTSC undergraduate course. Mondays, 3-5pm. Tutorials on Tuesdays.

ANT6061H – Anthropology of Sexuality and Gender

This graduate research seminar explores the core genealogies of feminist anthropology and anthropology of sexuality, with a focus on how scholarly conversations which emerged in 20th century anglophone sociocultural anthropology reverberate in the discipline today. We will examine the theoretical and methodological innovations that scholars enacted in the shift from “women anthropologists” to an “anthropology of women” to feminist and transfeminist ethnography. In doing so, we will ask: How has the field as a whole responded to feminist critiques of knowledge production? Moreover, how has anthropology contributed to the emergence of today’s robust, transnational gender and sexuality studies? What is an anthropological approach to gender and sexuality? How ought anthropologists reconcile the prescriptivism of gender and sexual identity politics with the descriptivism of the ethnographic project? How does the anthropological perspective challenge assumptions about human gender and sexuality across culture and over time? What theoretical underpinnings hold together the core logics of the anthropological approach to gender and sexuality? Throughout, we will problematize normative cultural paradigms of: biological sex, social gender, and sexual attraction; kinship & marriage; masculine and feminine divisions of labor; and sexuality and gender in racializing and colonizing projects. Texts include works by scholars such as: Gayle Rubin, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Levi-Strauss, Marjorie Shostak, Margery Wolf, Ellen Lewin, Esther Newton, Evelyn Blackwood, Marilyn Strathern, Ara Wilson, Tom Boellstorff, Kamala Visweswaran, Elizabeth Povinelli, Khiara M. Bridges, Sasha Su-Ling Welland, Ryan R. Thoreson, Bobby Benedicto, Tiantian Zheng, and others. While the focus of this course is on sociocultural anthropology, the course is appropriate for graduate students from across the discipline, and students are invited to integrate related scholarly conversations in archaeology and biological anthropology into discussions and coursework. St George graduate course. Thursday 2-5pm.

Winter / Spring 2020

HLTC52H3 S, Special Topics in Health Humanities: Global Disability Studies.
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. UTSC undergraduate course. Prerequisites: HLTB50. Counts toward the BA in Health Policy and the minor program in Health Humanities

HLTD53H3 S, Special Topics in Health Humanities: Beyond the Patient Perspective: Documentary and Memoir Workshop

How can we understand humanistic experiences of healthcare? Memoir writing and documentary media are one genre through which people speak for themselves about their experiences of care. Building on C-level courses in Health Humanities methods, in this course students further explore how works of documentary and memoir are made, and have an opportunity to workshop their own final projects that may take the form of creative works or critical papers. We explore memoirs of physicians and patients, of people living with disability, of those caring for increasingly disabled parents, of global experiences of disaster, intersectional experiences of immigrant mental health, and more. We look at practices of writing, film, and theater to draw conclusions about what makes a documentary voice compelling. We will consider ethical concerns of the genre, and interrogate the line between truth and fiction in mediated expressions of human experiences of health, illness, and disability. UTSC undergraduate course. Prerequisites: HLTB50H3 with a minimum grade of 70%; an additional 1.5 credits at the C-level in HLT courses from the program requirements from one of the Major/Major Co-op programs in Health Studies. Counts toward the BA in Health Policy and the minor program in Health Humanities

 

 

Past Teaching:

Disability Anthropology. Graduate Course. Fall 2018. University of Toronto.

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.