Teaching

My teaching is grounded in an antiracist feminist pedagogy that treats the classroom as a space for curiosity, critical inquiry, and collective intellectual struggle. I approach teaching as a relational and collaborative practice that invites students to unlearn dominant frames of knowledge, engage in difficult conversations, think critically about power, connect theory to lived experience, and envision a more just world.

My courses center interwoven issues of race, gender, and empire while highlighting formative and cutting-edge work by antiracist feminist scholars. They are structured around themes of collaboration, interdisciplinarity, intertextuality, and relationality that encourage students to rethink the relationship between oppression and resistance, creativity and theory, and scholarship and activism. I prioritize discussion, group work, and innovative assessments that bridge theory with creative methods, offering students multiple ways to express their learning while engaging deeply with course material.

Through my courses, students develop both the skills and desire to think curiously for themselves and out of a care for one another while relating across difference, which demonstrates significant student learning of antiracist feminist principles. This practice of thinking differently transforms how students approach knowledge, one another, and the world, and my teaching philosophy is centered around facilitating this transformative process while engaging students as co-creators of knowledge and agents of meaningful social change.

The effectiveness of this pedagogy is reflected in both student evaluations and institutional recognition. As the recipient of the 2022-2023 Gender Studies Teaching Award at Queen’s University, I was nominated by students for a teaching award based upon my creation of an inclusive, accessible, intellectually stimulating, and welcoming classroom environment to discuss the difficult topics of race, gender, access, and reproductive justice with openness, care, accountability, and rigor.

Courses Taught

  • Mount Allison University.

    This course introduces central themes and debates in the dynamic field of feminist and gender studies. Using a range of contemporary and historical materials, we will examine the ways that gender is constructed through and intersects with systems of power and oppression including sexism, racism, colonialism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and class discrimination.

    Topics: What is Feminism?; Rethinking Power, Difference, Privilege, and Oppression; Black Feminist Thought and the Analytical Framework of Intersectionality; Social Construction of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality; Beyond the Gender Binary; Queer and Trans Politics; Social Construction of Race; Race, the Floating Signifier; Legacies of Slavery and Misogynoir; Black Feminist Resistance; Gendered Legacies of Settler Colonialism; Indigenous Feminisms and Resurgence; Social Movements and Activism: Organizing for Social Change; Theorizing “Difference”; Transnational Feminisms; Reproductive Justice; Social Reproduction, Racial Capitalism, Migration, and Border Imperialism; Popular and Girlboss Feminisms; Disability Justice; and Abolition Feminisms

  • Mount Allison University.

    This course offers an interdisciplinary and transnational examination of Asian diasporic feminisms through the lens of cultural production. Throughout the course, we will study a wide range of texts produced both about and by Asian diasporic women that construct, represent, negotiate, contest, and reimagine themes of race, gender, sexuality, class, and nation. In doing so, we will consider the various geopolitical and social contexts shaping how Asian diasporic women and femininities have been theorized and represented—including through legacies of war, militarism, colonization, empire, trade, globalization, borders, surveillance, and racial-gendered discourse—as well as trace their impact on experiences of migration, intimacy, kinship, labor, social reproduction, diaspora, resistance, and activism. Drawing on fields such as Asian American studies, women of color feminisms, transpacific critique, and critical refugee studies, students will analyze critical feminist inquiries across Asian diasporas in the United States and Canada. By studying a diverse range of texts, films, literature, poetry, plays, and art produced both about and by Asian diasporic women, we will examine how cultural production not only reflects interwoven systems of power but also animates Asian diasporic feminist thought and activism. We will read scholarly articles alongside a music video by Mitski, a play by Velina Hasu Houston, poetry by Monica Sok, organizing by Filipina migrant care workers, and films by Rea Tajiri and Trinh T. Minh-ha. Creative and analytical writing assignments will offer students the opportunity to engage with key theoretical frameworks and analytical sites while honing their critical thinking skills across interdisciplinary mediums.

  • Mount Allison University.

    Students will investigate key parts of the history of feminist activism and examine the links and gaps between feminist theories and feminist practices. In praxis, theory and practice come together to create informed, conscious, and self-conscious action. Critical reflection on the histories of feminist praxis and on students' own positionality is a core element of this course.

  • Mount Allison University.

    This course examines human bodies in historical and contemporary socio-political contexts, investigating gender and embodiment both as an expression of individual identity and as a production of complex social processes. Drawing upon scholarship on body politics in the interdisciplinary fields of gender studies, critical ethnic studies, and feminist disability studies, we will consider how bodies are simultaneously gendered, raced, classed, sexualized, and politicized through interpersonal, social, and institutional processes, including law, culture, science, medicine, and globalization. We will consider a wide variety of topics including racialization, beauty, disability, reproduction, trans embodiment, and fatness. By engaging a range of theoretical perspectives and cultural productions that focus on the body, we will think critically about how we inhabit our bodies and how and why this comes to matter politically and socially.

    Topics: Introductory Theories; Feminist Phenomenology and Gender Performativity; Transfeminist Phenomenology; Racial Epidermalization; “Before the ‘Body’ There is the Flesh”: Hieroglyphics of the Flesh; Ornamentalism: Racialized Femininity and Objectification; Sexualized Settler Colonial Violence and Expendability; Black Women’s Geographies; Selling the Body: Stratified Reproduction, Sex Work, and Embodied Labor; Haunting, Trauma, Memory, Diaspora, and Affective Bodies; Disability and Embodiment; Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred; Biopolitics and Debility in Palestine; Trans Embodiment; The Struggle for Beauty; Beauty and Globalization; The Right to Beauty, and Moving Toward the Ugly; The Fat Body and the Politics of Anti-Fatness; and Thinking Beyond Body Positivity

  • Queen’s University.

    This course takes an explicitly antiracist feminist approach to understand the struggle for reproductive justice rather than reproductive rights. Through this framework, we will examine the racialized and gendered dynamics and ongoing historical legacies shaping and restricting notions of consent, choice, and access, and how these are deeply tied up in the fight for reproductive justice. Central to this approach will be a critical engagement with scholar-activist work and an understanding of organizing as both a science and an art. Keeping in mind Mariame Kaba’s note that “everything worthwhile is done with other people,” the course will center collaborative and group work—alongside the multifaceted work of activists, scholars, and creatives—so as to grapple with the interrelated stakes that we all hold in our contemporary moment, and to reconceptualize the interdisciplinary, relational, and interconnected project towards reproductive justice.

    Topics: Reproductive Justice, Not Just Rights; Scholar-Activism: Organizing as Science and Art; Black Reproduction and the Work of Dorothy Roberts; Indigenous Feminist Struggle(s) for Reproductive Sovereignty; Migratory and Domestic Care Work; Women of Color Organizing towards Reproductive Justice; White Christian Nationalism and the Conservative Religious Right: Fundie Influencers, Trad Wives, and the Trucker’s Convoy; Queer and Trans Bodily Autonomy; Disability Justice; Abolition Feminisms; and Holding Each Other Close: Where Do We Go From Here?

  • Queen’s University.

    This course centers interdisciplinary methodologies with a focus on studies of race, gender, and location. Drawing from a range of scholarship in Black Studies, Indigenous Studies, Asian American Studies, Anticolonial Studies, and Feminist Studies, along with creative texts, the course moves towards an interdisciplinary relational approach in order to demonstrate how processes such as empire, conquest, and racial capitalism interweave multiple communities and geographies. The course builds on what Lisa Lowe theorizes as “the intimacies of four continents” (Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America). In this way, the course focuses on multiple ways of knowing and multiple approaches to understanding race and location. The course combines “theoretical works” such as journal articles and academic books with “creative texts” such as novels, songs, films, and poetry, in order to conceptualize how both forms are used to theorize race. The course’s orientation towards interdisciplinary, collaborative, and relational ways of knowing and being thus encourages critical reflections on, and engagements with, collective practices and coalitional modes that strive for social change.

    Topics: Introduction(s) to the Course, and Introductory Theories; Science of The Word; The Intimacies of Four Continents; Asia, Empire, and The Trans/national; “Temporary Spaces of Joy and Freedom”; Diaspora and Complicating “Home”; Black Feminist Metaphysics, Poetics, and Speculative Thought; Citations and Relational Methodologies; Queerness, Blackness, and Nonlinear Time; The Humanities After Man: Sensibilities “That Are of the Thickness of History and Life”; Poetics of Relation; and Relationality and the Sonic

Courses TA’ed

  • Queen’s University.

    Marking.

  • Queen’s University.

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  • Queen’s University.

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  • Queen’s University.

    Fall 2022: Head teaching assistant.

    • Supervised and mentored six teaching assistants on effective teaching strategies, leading tutorials, marking assignments, and interacting with students; provided leadership development and pedagogical guidance.

    • Provided teaching and administrative support for a 200+ student Gender Studies course, including managing online learning platforms, handling communications with students, taking and uploading lecture notes for student access, managing accommodations, reviewing grades and feedback to ensure consistency across tutorial sections, and navigating student concerns.

    Fall 2018.

    • Instructed two tutorial sections composed of twenty students each, meeting once per week for lecture, discussion, and review.

    • Developed and delivered appropriate curriculum and teaching materials, including slideshows, lectures, discussion questions, activities, media, evaluations, quizzes, and assignment guidelines, to ensure that courses met outlined learning objectives.

    • Evaluated student submissions and provided extensive written feedback, with a focus on improving students’ critical thinking, research design, argument structure, and analytical writing skills.

    • Provided individualized mentorship and advised students on course material, learning objectives, research design, academic writing, and extracurricular opportunities.

    • Assisted faculty with administrative tasks and curriculum development, including designing evaluations, grading assignments, managing online learning platforms, handling communications with students, meeting with students for extra review/support, and overseeing accommodations.

  • Queen’s University.

    Marking.

  • Queen’s University.

    • For three terms, instructed two tutorial sections composed of twenty to thirty students each per term, meeting once per week for lecture, discussion, and review.

    • Developed and delivered appropriate curriculum and teaching materials, including slideshows, lectures, discussion questions, activities, media, evaluations, quizzes, and assignment guidelines, to ensure that courses met outlined learning objectives.

    • Evaluated student submissions and provided extensive written feedback, with a focus on improving students’ critical thinking, research design, argument structure, and analytical writing skills.

    • Provided individualized mentorship and advised students on course material, learning objectives, research design, academic writing, and extracurricular opportunities.

    • Assisted faculty with administrative tasks and curriculum development, including designing evaluations, grading assignments, managing online learning platforms, handling communications with students, meeting with students for extra review/support, and overseeing accommodations.

  • Queen’s University.

    Marking.

  • Queen’s University.

    Marking.

  • Queen’s University.

    Marking.

  • Queen’s University.

    Marking.

  • Queen’s University.

    Marking.

  • Queen’s University.

    Marking.

  • Queen’s University.

    • Instructed two tutorial sections composed of twenty students each, meeting once per week for lecture, discussion, and review.

    • Developed and delivered appropriate curriculum and teaching materials, including slideshows, lectures, discussion questions, activities, media, evaluations, quizzes, and assignment guidelines, to ensure that courses met outlined learning objectives.

    • Evaluated student submissions and provided extensive written feedback, with a focus on improving students’ critical thinking, research design, argument structure, and analytical writing skills.

    • Provided individualized mentorship and advised students on course material, learning objectives, research design, academic writing, and extracurricular opportunities.

    • Assisted faculty with administrative tasks and curriculum development, including designing evaluations, grading assignments, managing online learning platforms, handling communications with students, meeting with students for extra review/support, and overseeing accommodations.

  • University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

    • Provided teaching and instructional support for professor and helped administer the course, including attendance of lecture and discussion sections, presentation of guest lectures, and provision of student support.

“I know teaching is a survival technique. It is for me and I think it is in general; the only way real learning happens. Because I myself was learning something I needed to continue living. And I was examining it and teaching it at the same time I
was learning it. I was teaching it to myself aloud.”
— Audre Lorde

Teaching Interests

Transnational and diasporic feminisms; relational studies of race and racism; interdisciplinary methodologies; science and storytelling; colonial domesticity and social reproduction; militarism and empire; Asian American studies; anticolonial theory; memory, archives, and haunting; popular culture and cultural production; women of color feminisms; abolition feminisms; feminist disability studies; speculative fiction; and women of color’s literature.