Teaching Philosophy
At the core of my teaching is the idea that space and place are historically produced instruments of power. I want students to understand that seemingly stable spaces of the nation, the city, or the home are contingent on changing notions of property and social differences like race, gender, sexuality, citizenship, and more. My courses denaturalize spaces such as “the home” and interrogate narratives about urban belonging through the lens of racialized homelessness. I seek to help students understand that the contemporary crisis of racialized homelessness is neither natural nor inevitable. Rather, it can be traced in the histories of enslavement, colonization, genocide, and imperialism. To this end, I teach students how to closely analyze popular media, novels, and films for representations of city spaces and urban belonging. I teach students how to think historically and furnish them with the capacity to intervene in knowledge production about housing and social difference.
I have taught courses in American Ethnic Studies, Indigenous Studies, Housing Justice, and in English Composition.
Housing Justice
This course examines contested ideas of what counts as proper housing and who belongs in the city. Students learn the contemporary crisis of racialized homelessness is neither natural nor inevitable. Urban dispossession is contextualized in the histories of urban renewal, Indigenous relocation, gentrification, police violence, and more. This is a community-engaged learning course and iterations of the class have been partnered with ROOTS Young Adult Shelter, Compass Housing Alliance, Union Gospel Mission, and others.
The Indigenous City
This course considers the period of Indigenous removal from reservations and forcible resettlement in cities by the US government from the 1950s to the 1970s. It approaches the city as not only a space of Indigenous dispossession but also a site of Indigenous belonging and decolonization. The course examines the Red Power movement and the Indigenous occupation of Alcatraz as well as novels such as Tommy Orange’s There There (2018). Together the course reveals that the city is now and always has been Indigenous.