• ANTH 1200
  Cultural Anthropology

  Fall 2021, Fall 2022

  Course Description: Anthropology is the scientific and humanistic study of human beings. Cultural anthropology is a subfield of anthropology that is concerned with human processes of meaning making, or culture. This course is a general overview of cultural anthropology. It covers a broad range of topics, divided into three sections. The first section will introduce the anthropological worldview to situate student understanding of what it means to “think anthropologically.” The middle section will explore subjectivities, or how we create our senses of Self and Other. This section will cover topics such as sex/gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, kinship, language, political and economic systems, and religion. The final section of the course will be a consideration of social inequality from an anthropological perspective. Students will also be introduced to ethnography, which is both the main method of “doing” cultural anthropology as well as its main product.

• ANTH 3511
  Culture/Family/Kin

  Fall 2021, Summer 2022 (online asynchronous), Spring 2023 (online asynchronous)

  Course Description: Kinship, the most basic level of social organization, has historically been a central focus within anthropology. The study of kinship has recently experienced a revival in anthropology as scholars have returned to questions of relatedness as it emerges in people’s everyday lives. This course takes a critical approach to the anthropological understanding of kinship. We will begin by examining the evolution of anthropological kinship theory from the late 19^th century through the present. We will then utilize theoretical and ethnographic texts explore how kinship is understood by anthropologists today.

• ANTH 4511
  Medical Anthropology

  Spring 2023

  Course Description:This course will introduce students to the anthropological study of health, disease, and medical systems, and will pay special attention to the political, economic, gendered, racialized, and technologized implications of medicine and health care. We will explore how medical knowledge is produced, reproduced, and granted a uniquely authoritative role in human life. We will also examine how medical practices are infused with culture and shape the culture of the societies in which they appear.

• ANTH 4419/6419
  Queer Anthropology

  Spring 2022

  Course Description: This course examines anthropological understandings of non-normative genders and sexualities. We will explore the history of queer theory, teasing apart its foundations in feminism and gay and lesbian studies to better understand its anti-heteronormative stance. Special attention will be given to the influences of queer and trans social theory on anthropological and ethnographic investigations of gender and sexuality. With this background, we will turn our attention to contemporary issues in queer and trans studies, both through a close reading of two ethnographic texts and through a semester-long ethnographic project that will require students to apply their insights on queer and trans scholarship to a question or problem in the Memphis community.

• ANTH 4521/6521
  Culture, Society, and Mental Health

  Spring 2022

  Course Description: In this course, we will examine anthropological understandings of mental health and illness as subjective experiences that are profoundly shaped by social norms and cultural values. The course is organized around three organizational components: first, we will explore how some experiences come to be pathologized—treated as abnormal; second, we will investigate the ways such abnormalities come to be defined, categorized, and diagnosed as problems of mental health, giving special attention to how such diagnoses create new kinds of people and become internalized as new kinds of identities; and third, we will analyze how such diagnoses come to be controlled—that is, what are the social, technical, medical, and symbolic factors at work after diagnoses occurs, such as social isolation or psychopharmacological treatment.

UT-San Antonio Honors College (2019-2020)

• 2020
  Dungeons & Dragons: An Academic Adventure

  (This course counted towards the required Academic Inquiry Studies (AIS) courses incoming freshman take.) The table-top roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) has recently surged in popularity and is increasingly becoming an object of interest to academics across disciplines. D&D involves a group of people engaging in cooperative storytelling guided by the luck of rolling dice to shape the direction and outcome of player actions, sometimes moving the story surprising directions. While D&D is a lot of fun to play, it’s also an excellent opportunity for thinking about and studying human relationships and social structures. In this course, we will use D&D as a tool for exploring several topics of interest in the social sciences and humanities, such as group dynamics, social roles and identities, communication strategies, creative problem solving, exchange and negotiation, cultural diversity, and research strategies/methods, as well as put the Honors Ethos (HERBS) into practice. This course will provide students with the opportunity to study D&D from academic perspectives as well as to use D&D as a lens through which to view what it means to be human.
• 2020
  Social Justice in American Medicine

  Much of the literature on health, justice, and medicine in the United States focuses on health inequity and disparities, particularly along racial/ethnic, class, and gender/sexuality lines. When this literature turns an eye toward physicians, it often does so in an effort to better understand population-level health disparities, especially the role physicians play in reproducing these disparities. Other scholarship describes and examines the racist, classist, sexist, and/or heterosexist beliefs that are often expressed through medical practice and research. What is lacking in this academic field is a sustained and rigorous attention to the subject positionality of the social minority physicians themselves; this is in-part due to the dominance of straight white able-bodied cisgender men in the medical profession. In what ways are medical education, training, and practice reproducing the structural inequalities that produce the very health problems medical systems seek to address? This course will examine the role of structural inequality and violence in American health care, both in contemporary and historical contexts. Drawing on scholarly books and articles from across social scientific and humanistic disciplines, we will analyze the ways American medicine is an ongoing site of the struggle for social justice. Through the perspectives of medical students, residents, physicians, and patients, this course serves as a survey of how different disciplines approach the study of American medicine as a social problem with an eye toward potential avenues for achieving a more equitable health care system.
• 2020
  Risk, Society, and Culture

  This course explores theories and practices of risk in historical and contemporary Euro-American societies. It begins by examining the formation and emergence of “risk” as a concept grounded in new biopolitical logics of probability during the 19th century. Next, we examine several theoretical frameworks for explaining how risk operates in contemporary societies. We then engage several social scientific explorations of risk grounded in the domains of politics, economics, health, and environment.
• 2019, 2020
  The Civic Ethos

  A standardized Honors College course required for all Honors students. An introduction to the theories involved with the value of civic participation, community involvement, public service, and volunteerism.
• 2019
  Honors Tutorial I: Justice

  “An introduction to the Honors College’s Tutorial sequence via an introductory in-depth exploration into the student’s chosen area of expertise. Focus is upon familiarizing students with materials that will distinguish them from peers in their chosen major. This course that requires the student to pass a written and oral examination on the semester’s materials.” (From the 2018-2020 Undergraduate Catalog.)

  A required Honors College course, the Tutorial sequence focused around one of four themes: environment, wellbeing, economy, or justice. In my sections of Honors Tutorial I, we focused on the topic of justice from a variety of disciplinary perspectives across the humanities and social sciences, as well as public intellectual discourse. We built a foundation of intellectual empathy and learned how to engage with others in good-faith discussions aimed at building common understanding. Next, we explored the varied meanings of justice, various approaches to enacting justice, and the role of activism and community building in building a just world. Students then selected readings from relevant public intellectual discourses from reputable sources to present and discuss in class.

University of Arizona School of Anthropology (2017-2018)

• 2017, 2018
  Women's Health in Global Perspective

  This senior-level course is cross-listed with Gender & Women’s Studies and Public Health. It is a five-week summer online course and is the first fully-online course I have taught. I taught it in the summer of 2017 and 2018. The course begins with some theoretical readings that draw students into a critical examination of gender, race, the body, and globalization in order to unsettle assumptions about the apparent meanings of concepts such as “woman,” “health,” and “global.” Next, students are expected to apply these theoretical insights to important topics in women’s health around the world while simultaneously focusing on case studies on life stages from birth to death. The course ends by reading a contemporary ethnographic exploration of women’s health (the 2017 course read Vita by João Biehl and the 2018 course read Daughters of Parvati by Sarah Pinto). Syllabuses for both courses will be uploaded at a later date.

UT-San Antonio Department of Anthropology (2012-2014, 2017)

• 2017
  Anthropology of Biomedicine

  This senior-level special topics course introduced students to the anthropological study of biomedicine. It was aimed at students interested in medical anthropology, public health, and medical humanities, as well as students planning to go into medical and paramedical professions. The course began with a brief introduction to philosophy of medicine, covering notions of knowledge and reality, and used evidence-based medicine and embodiment as means for understanding medical epistemologies and ontologies. It then covered medical education and training, including the role of professionalization and expertise, before studying processes of biomedicalization and pharmaceuticalization, with a particular focus on race and sex/gender. It concluded with an examination of biomedicine in a non-Western context. Syllabus will be made available in the future.
• 2014
  Sex/Gender and Culture

  This junior-level course was a five-week summer course. Because of the short length of time, I decided to structure the class around an emphasis on science and medicine rather than try to explore such a wide-ranging topic in just 5 weeks. In the future, I would teach this course as a “sex/gender, sexuality, science, and medicine” course, and have a more general “anthropology of sex/gender and sexuality” that was much more cross-cultural. Part of my goal for this course was to introduce students to what a biocultural perspective might look like and how such a perspective could shape our understandings of sex/gender, sexuality, bodies, and science as a sociocultural practice. Similar to the kinship course, this course was entirely discussion based, and students were required to submit daily critical reading questions, which were used to guide in-class discussion. Syllabus is available here.
• 2014
  Kinship and Social Organization

  This junior-level course had not been taught in the department for many years, and I was granted permission to teach it. This was the first time I really experimented pedagogically and made conscious efforts to queer my teaching methods. The course was almost entirely discussion-based with some lecturing to introduce or clarify important material. The students were required to regularly submit reading discussion questions through the online course website, which were used to guide in-class conversation. Students were assessed on their ability to write concise essays applying important theories and ideas from the course to real-world examples of kinship and familial relations. Overall, I was quite happy with how the course worked, and the students were very engaged–there was never a dull moment in class. Syllabus is available here.
• 2014
  Introduction to Anthropology

  This freshman-level course introduced students to basic concepts across the four subfields of anthropology: biological anthropology, archaeology, linguistic anthropology, and cultural anthropology. Syllabus available here.
• 2014
  Introduction to Cultural Anthropology

  This sophomore-level course introduced students to basic concepts in cultural anthropology through its main method: ethnography. I experimented a bit with the course structure here, and overall I think it worked well. Syllabus available here.
• 2012
  Language, Thought, and Culture

  This sophomore-level course was the first course I taught on my own, and I stuck to pretty standard pedagogical methods. It was quite the learning experience! This was the only course I taught that had a traditional pedagogy. While it’s certainly a tried-and-true method for producing a quantitative “measurable” outcome, and I know the students learned a lot, I think students could learn even more when not focused as much on earning numbers and instead concentrate on critically analyzing, understanding, and applying concepts and ideas. Syllabus is here.