Teaching

Teaching is one of the great privileges of a career within education, and I have been lucky to teach undergraduate students through courses I have developed, as well as high school students through workshops and internship programs. In the best cases, the co-created spaces of teaching and learning can be transformative for both students and instructor. These transformations and sharpening of commitments are as moving to witness in my students as they are to experience personally.

Courses

AGAINST DYSTOPIA (Currently teaching Autumn 2023)

Ideas of dystopian futures haunt present-day imaginings of the climate crisis. Such futures are typically characterized by worsening inequality, disastrous weather effects, and deeply disrupted social relations. Apocalyptic imaginaries also tend to invoke an individualist politics oriented around struggle over scarce resources. But what about those for whom the present is already post-apocalyptic? What about political configurations that insist on solidarity, mutuality, care, and justice to create liberatory futures? Just solutions to the climate crisis are only as capacious as the imagination of what the problems are, how the present came into being, who is most affected, and who gets to decide what futures are created. This interdisciplinary course engages ethnographic work alongside theorizations of contemporary life and other world-building genres, including climate fiction, visual art, and poetry. In doing so, the course offers an argument against the fatalism of dystopia and seeks to imagine what reparative methods centering climate justice could look like.

CLIMATE CHANGE AND COLONIALISM (Taught Spring 2023)

In 2022, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recognized colonialism’s contributions to the climate crisis, citing its “historical and ongoing patterns of inequity.” This was the first time that this group of climate experts had ever formally acknowledged colonialism, despite activists, writers, artists, and scholars from around the world emphasizing the devastations of colonial extractions. A sole focus on the present and future of the climate crisis obscures a deeper understanding of how the crisis came to be. This course asks: How has colonialism, namely, colonial processes of domination, extraction, control, dispossession, knowledge-making, and violence, produced the climate crisis as well as enduring inequalities? How does the past intimately structure the possibilities of the present? How can an understanding of colonialism’s “historical and ongoing” effects deepen calls for climate justice? In this seminar, we will see how climate change is intensified through unequal social, political, and economic distributions of harm and advantage, how climate vulnerability is created and maintained, and what different modes of refusal and repair of these processes can entail.

Other Syllabi Developed:

Air, Earth, Water, Weather (Elemental Methods)

Extraction

Global Histories of Environmental Justice

The Politics of Breathing

Pollution and Toxicity

Workshops

Worldmaking: From Colonialism to Climate Justice

In partnership with the Climate Museum, “Worldmaking: From Colonialism to Climate Justice” was a free two-day workshop series held in October 2023 focused on humanities and social science approaches to climate justice for high school students based in New York City. More information about the program can be found here.

Teaching Tools

I am very happy to share my experiences with any of these teaching tools, or have a longer discussion about pedagogy, at any time! Please get in touch here.

COLLABORATIVE ZINE

Students may submit essays, creative materials, visual art, poetry, or other media for inclusion into a collaborative class zine. Digital or printed copies may be created for distribution by the end of the semester. I recommend giving interested students the opportunity of forming an editorial collective for creative decision-making about the overall zine and its layout and design, and supporting students through this process logistically.

A beautiful example of a collaborative course zine that my students created, entitled “Keywords for Climate Imaginaries: a zine for growth and repair,” can be found here.

STUDENT LETTERS

Inspired by Rehearsals for Living by Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and following a class discussion of the text, students form letter-writing pairs for the semester. One member of each pair submits a letter to the other each week, alternating throughout the semester. As an instructor, I provide prompts for the letters each week that are related to the course readings, but I also offer students the flexibility to focus on responding to their interlocutor’s previous letter or discussing other thoughts within this space. This is one method of having a sustained dialogue with a peer throughout the duration of a course (or for a few weeks during the semester or quarter).