PAST & PRESENT COURSES
I teach a variety of classes spanning the introductory, intermediate, and advanced levels at the intersection of political science, intellectual history, gender & sexuality studies, critical race studies, and qualitative methodology.
CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL IDEAS
Students are introduced to a variety of political and material ideologies with the assistance of Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped From the Beginning, the winning non-fiction text for the 2016 National Book Award. Given that political science as a discipline emerged from the founders of the modern historical methodology, this text allows students to assess the current political landscape while exploring canonical philosophical writings that influenced the development of classical political ideologies (anarchism, liberalism, and conservatism), material ideologies (populism, nationalism, and environmentalism), and alternative political ideologies (abolitionism, socialism, fascism, and feminism).
The question that guides the scholarly endeavor for this class is as follows: why do ideas become stagnant when they are shot through with power?
URBAN POLITICS
In this course, students gain a general background for the study of cities, urban politics, and the interplay of identity politics, political economy, spatial ideology, and a sense of place to American politics. The focus of the course is upon those attributes of urban environments that make city politics different from politics as practiced in other settings. Students develop an understanding of how American cities have changed and the types of political transformations such change has stimulated. Much of the course will focus on the metropolitan space of Philadelphia, but many of the theories are applicable to any major American, and perhaps global, city.
IMAGE: Love Park in Center City Philly, 2019 (see "Four Takeaways from Race, Class AND Gender: Intersectional Approaches to Social Justice Funding" by Diane Cornman-Levy at Philanthropy Network Greater Philadelphia)
THEORIES OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY
Beginning with the paradox of democracy developed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), this course opens by interrogating the paradox of founding at the heart of democratic societies. Put differently, how do a people become a people in the first place? We will collectively explore how structural inequalities further complicate the democratic promise of inclusivity both in the United States and other nations included in the umbrella of the Americas (i.e. Canada and Haiti). Investigating the latent issues of democracy and diversity, we will consider various forms of difference like indigeneity, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, ability, nationality, and class. The course readings highlight scholarship by contemporary political theorists who recently have been or are currently teaching at colleges and universities across and beyond the United States. Questions explored throughout the course will be: What are the core contradictions in thinking about democracy? Are they complicated or resolved by strategies that place racism, sexism, homophobia, and/or general prejudice/xenophobia at the forethought of political thinking and action? Finally, can we develop democratic thought free of contradictions that can then promote a society worthy of the signifier democratic?
IMAGE: Shepard Fairey, “We the People” Series, 2017
POLITICS OF RACIAL CAPITALISM
In this seminar course, students explore the critical and very contentious relationship between two projects that animate much of our collective contemporary political landscape - racism & capitalism. They begin this exploration by considering a discussion on the concept of modernity coupled with a prescription of the current iteration of capitalism that we all live under. Then they turn to three texts under the rubric of "post-Marxism" each of which is dedicated to recentering axes of difference that were targetted by modernity for exploitation under capitalism - gender, race, and class. Lastly, we engage a selection of post-Marxist manifestoes for the purpose of comparison to the original "Communist Manifesto" and with the diagnostic aim of understanding the stakes in rethinking modernity & capitalism in the face of our current large scale crisis (both existential and political) - climate change/Anthropocene.
IMAGE: Nedeljkovich, Brashich, & Kuharich, Pyramid of Capitalist System, 1911, magazine print, The International Publishing Company.
BLACK FEMINIST POLITICAL THOUGHT
In 1982 Gloria T. Hull and Barbara Smith developed an anthology whose title made a profound statement about a common trend across the disciplines of history, literature, political science, and race/ethnic studies – All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave. With that text, they launched a new field of study, Black Women’s Studies. To this day, Black female/femme scholars have fought for academic recognition both in disciplinary and interdisciplinary spaces. This course aims to revisit Black feminist political thought as it struggles with and against the field of political science. It is organized thematically by the three Reconstructions: first – the struggle against slavery & for abolition democracy; second – the struggle against Jim and Jane Crow & for Civil Rights; and, third – the rise of #BlackLivesMatter during the Presidency of Barack Obama and the significance of its corollary #MeToo under the Presidency of Donald Trump.
IMAGE: Rebecca Cohen, “Bree Newsome as Wonder Woman,” 2015
POLITICAL VISIONS OF THE CITY
Across the globe, the majority of people live in cities and organize politically through sovereign nation-states. Neither of these organizational practices was always the case. Before 2008, more people resided in rural spaces than urban ones. Before the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), cities were the primary social units where political decisions and debates took place. This course is designed to give theoretical and conceptual literacy to the idea of the city with the aim of contextualizing the current racial and political divides in the U.S. across the urban-rural spectrum and is divided into three parts. In part 1, we begin by tracing the political vision of the city in various canonical texts of Western political thought from the ancient thinkers (Plato & Aristotle) through the medieval era (Augustine & Christine de Pizan) to the modern social contract theorists (Hobbes, Locke, & Rousseau). In part 2, we turn to the context of the U.S. with an introduction to American political thought (Jefferson, Whitman, & Harriet Jacobs) and engagement with contemporary Black American political thought with a focus on access to voting (Du Bois, Malcolm X, & Fannie Lou Hamer). In part 3, we turn to a close reading of Black feminist queer political theorist, architecture critique, and poet June Jordan’s book Civil Wars (1981).
INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN GOVERNMENT
Using a variety of documentaries, this course explores the ways in which these practices inform whether and how people understand their position in the demos (via public opinion & media), position themselves in/alongside the political systems (via elections & political parties), organize for change (via social movements & interest groups), and whether they succeed or fail (owing to dynamics of domestic & foreign policy). It also exposes students to normative and empirical debates in the field of American Politics about how these practices are best addressed, the methods scholars use to better understand them, and the singular question that guides the course - what is democracy?
FIRST YEAR INQUIRY SEMINAR
Written as a love letter to his son, Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates frames the inquiry of race around concerns over Black masculinity. Falling out of this frame, and falling out of the frame of much of the study of race in and beyond the United States, is the contributions made by Black women/femmes for the liberation of all peoples. This course aims to center the life of one such person, Claudia Jones. A foremost Civil Rights activist, Jones immigrated to the United States from Trinidad when she was 9 years old. By the age of 40, she was forced to find refuge elsewhere due to her affiliation and professional involvement with the Communist Party USA. Like Martin Luther King, Jr., Jones was targeted by the FBI via COINTELPRO. Like W.E.B. Du Bois, Jones was subjected to the institutional political machine of McCarthyism. So why does she remain so unfamiliar to students and scholars alike? This course is designed to center a slightly different question and uses a study of Jones’s life and work as a political activist, investigative journalist, community organizer, and intellectual progenitor of the Black radical tradition to answer it: “How is difference constructed and what differences matter?"
The picture is an artistic portrait of Claudia Jones commissioned by the Claudia Jones Organization based in London.
POLITICS OF PRISON ABOLITION
While abolishing birthright citizenship and abolishing I.C.E. are ideas that have clearly demarcated partisan leanings across the body politic of the United States, the topic of the incompatibility of the American ideal of freedom and the very American reality of mass incarceration has sparked bi-partisan interest (e.g. FIRST STEP Act of 2018). Within this spectrum of supporters for such efforts, the difference between criminal justice reform and prison abolition remains largely under-examined. In this course, students will rethink the relationship between media & politics through the keyhole issue of prison abolition. Although this course is primarily a theory course, the topic has clear empirical overtones when it comes to the role prisons play in democratic societies. Broadening the definition of media beyond traditional news and social media, this course will explore the imaginary, consumption, and conception of prisons in film, television, and tourism.
Jenji Kohan's award-winning Netflix Series Orange Is the New Black (2013-2019) is featured for this class.