In the 2022-24 academic years, I’m Visiting Assistant Professor of Critical Social Thought at Hampshire College.

My combination of activism and research inform my teaching methodologies. In all my courses, my primary goal is the help students develop skills to analyze and challenge systems of domination.

While trained in Political Science, I find the most effective and impactful courses take an interdisciplinary approach, centered around topics. Instead of thinking of my teaching as based on traditional fields, I categorize my courses under three general themes: identifying and analyzing social issues, envisioning better futures, and enacting effective social change. While there’s of course overlap in these three general categories, and elements of each in every course, overall my intention is to connect large-scale political issues to students’ everyday lives, helping them to develop the tools to analyze and take action around their concerns. Below, I describe some courses I’ve taught in each of these categories.

Identifying and Analyzing Social Issues

The State: Theories and Histories of Domination and Resistance: The State has become the dominant political institution, claiming dominion over every speck of habitable land on the planet. But omnipresent as it seems, the modern State is a relatively new development in human affairs. What is the State? How did it originate, outcompete other political forms, and come to divide up the world? Why have people resisted and fled the State for as long as it has existed, and what tactics did resistance take? How does the State make itself appear to be natural, inevitable, and necessary? At its core, is the State a tool for protecting peace and fundamental human freedoms, or a structure of warmaking and oppression? What tactics does the State use to ensure internal order and compliance of its population? What are its future prospects? While grounded primarily in political theory, students examine the State from a variety of academic disciplines and political ideologies.

To Recycle is Not Enough: Political Economies of Waste: Tossing something in the trash is an almost thoughtless, automatic part of our daily existence. How are our habits, practices, systems, and institutions around waste tied in with domination and social inequality? Who does the dirty work, and how is this related to inequalities around class, gender, and race? How have historical changes in materials and waste systems shaped our contemporary understanding of our selves, and our relations with each other? What social assumptions allow waste relations to be seen as an acceptable and inevitable part of contemporary life? Where is this ‘away’ to which we throw, and what are the lives of the people like there? Focusing on waste connects local actions to global systems, encompassing dirty and dangerous work, environmental racism, and ecological devastation. In addition to thinking broadly about these themes, students will also examine their own waste practices, campus and regional waste infrastructures, and our ethical and political entanglements with these systems, tying all these themes together in a collective blog.

Ethnography as Methodology: Studying Through Participant-Observation: Most academic social inquiry methodologies are from ‘afar’: library research, archives, surveys, data sets, quantitative analyses, web scraping, formal modeling, and so on. By contrast, the ethnographic researcher immerses into a social structure, understanding through participant-observation. What does it mean to study ‘from below?’ What can immersion help us understand that other research methods miss, and what are its limitations? What are the ethical considerations for this form of research, and who are we making our research results for? While studying examples of major ethnographic works, students will start their own ethnographic projects. This involves identifying fieldsites, regularly traveling there, taking and analyzing fieldnotes, and writing a final project synthesizing their study with course themes.

I also similarly structured an introductory Comparative Politics course for first semester students at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, covering the historical evolution of core inequalities that have shaped our contemporary world, from the rise of modern states, through the colonial and decolonial eras, ending with potentials for addressing these legacies.

Envisioning Better Futures

Radical Political Thought: The Cannon of political theory presents capitalism, the State, and other social hierarchies as the pinnacle of human freedom and progress. By contrast, radical political thought critiques the power and domination hiding in these structures and ideologies, theorizing what liberation is, and how it can be achieved. This course will provide an introductory overview to many forms of radical political theory, broadly defined. Sources will draw on a variety of traditions, including communism, anarchism, feminist, queer, black, indigenous, decolonial, and poststructural theory. Additional topics to be covered based on the interest of the class. This course is intended as a general introduction to a range of political thought, ideal for those who otherwise haven’t studied political theory.

Anarchisms: Anti-Authoritarian Theory and Practice: Almost all political theory, despite extreme variations across cultures and time, seeks to justify submission to authority. By contrast, anarchism explicitly rejects forms of domination claimed to be central to so-called civilization, especially the State, capitalism, and religion, expanding in recent decades to include patriarchy, racism, coloniality, sexual and gender hierarchies, eurocentricism, technology, aesthetic norms, and western epistemological methods. Despite being caricatured as individualistic and violent, anarchism seeks not only to oppose forms of domination, but to build up different social structures, based on principles of consent, mutuality, solidarity, and federation. Through these critiques, anarchism is a critical challenge to conservative understandings of ‘liberty,’ as well as leftist movements centering the seizure and use of State power as the primary revolutionary method. Grounded in political theory and historical examples, this course will survey major themes in anti-authoritarian thought and practice. Students should expect to read an average of 30-40 pages of material in preparation for each class, and help to collectively run discussions.

Enacting Effective Social Change

Social Movements: Theory, Practice, Strategy: What is a social movement? Under which conditions do they emerge, and what accounts for their success or decline? This course will provide a broad overview of social movements from the past several decades, including movements of labor, civil rights and black liberation, queer liberation, global justice, plaza occupations, and the environment. In addition to studying specific movements, throughout the course we will collectively develop a strategy guide for organizing a social movement based on historical examples. As a final project, students will use this guide to create an outline for organizing a social movement campaign on an issue of their choosing.

Utopian Separatism: Withdrawal and Prefiguration as Resistance and Revolution: While many revolutionary movements attempt to seize State power, there have always been those who resist through withdrawal, creating their own communities, organized around a utopian vision of a more just social order. Experimenting in communalizing property, income, and resources, they aim to create the social conditions for moving away from reliance on the State, wage labor, and nuclear family, creating a prefigurative society. This course covers a broad overview of such attempts, including radical spiritualist movements, maroon societies, 19th century American utopianism, utopian socialism, ‘back to the land’ communes, black separatists, and queer separatists. We will understand the context of their emergence, motivating ideologies, structure of their social systems, and assess the efficacy of these methods, both as sustained experimental modes of life, and as projects of social transformation. Using our analysis of these experiments, students will split up into small groups early in the course, and design the major aspects of their own communal utopian experiments, including core agreements, overview of political and economic structures, conflict resolution plans, family and relationship structures, a narrative ‘day in the life’ description of a typical member, and outreach propaganda.