As an anthropologist and assistant professor of urban and environmental policy, I work with students to explore how grounded and critically engaged ethnographic methodologies, combined with investigations of urbanism elsewhere, can inform innovative and socially just policymaking. See below for descriptions of courses I have recently taught.
Global Cities This introductory undergraduate course examines world cities and the infrastructures, social relations, and global flows that shape urban life. Drawing on anthropology, urban studies, geography, and related fields, students explore how urban spaces are produced, contested, remembered, and transformed, and how distinctions between “urban” and “natural” environments are negotiated in everyday life. Through case studies spanning ancient cities, transportation systems, food networks, waste infrastructures, and waterfront redevelopment, the course introduces key concepts for understanding urban inequality, mobility, citizenship, environmental change, and place-making. A central emphasis of the course is ethnography as both a research method and a way of understanding everyday urban life. Fieldwork assignments give students hands-on experience using anthropological approaches to investigate the social, material, and political realities of urban life. This gateway anthropology course also fulfills requirements for urban studies, IR, and STS.
Cities in Space, Place, & Time This core course for graduate students in Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning introduces students to key moments in the histories of cities and planning and equips them with analytic lenses and methodological tools for assessing the diverse contexts in which planners and policymakers work. Though not a comprehensive "history of cities" course, the class draws on cases from cities in different historical periods and geographic contexts to examine how the past permeates the present, how global entanglements shape urban life and governance, and how plans and policies produce differentiated effects on people and environments. Throughout the course, students critically reflect on how they, as future policy and planning practitioners, can operate effectively and ethically within these complex social, political, and spatial settings.
Ethnography for Policy and Planning This upper-level research seminar introduces students to the craft of ethnography and explores how qualitative, embedded, and socially committed research can critically and constructively intervene in contemporary urban problems. We read both classic and cutting-edge ethnographic texts on topics like addiction, eviction, violence, insecurity, informal markets, participatory planning, and urban social movements. At the same time, students experiment with different ethnographic and qualitative research methods – including writing field notes and thick description, spatial and participant observation, in-depth interviewing, material culture analysis, and archival, discourse and media analysis – as they design and execute their own original research projects. Ultimately, our goal is to use ethnographic methods and modes of analysis to uncover alternative ways of envisioning and attending to the world, and to theorize how these new vantages might contribute to creating more just policies and urban spaces.
Global Urban Developments: Critical Perspectives, Emergent Futures Peru has almost no homelessness. Nigeria developed rideshare systems before Uber. Brazil enshrined the “right to the city” in its constitution. Around the world, cities are experimenting with bold and surprising solutions to urban problems. But most of these stories never make it into the urban studies canon or the urban planning playbook. This course challenges that narrow focus. By placing case studies of cities in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East alongside critical urban and anthropological theory, we’ll explore how urban environments outside the Global North confront inequality, reimagine infrastructure, and shape possible futures. Topics include informal urban expansion, spatial segregation, water and energy infrastructure, transportation innovations, new urban ecologies, climate change solutions, migrant relocations, and emergent modes of urban design, political engagement, and social mobilization. Along the way, students learn to use comparative perspectives to generate fresh approaches to urban challenges, anticipate how global policy models operate across diverse contexts, and strengthen critical thinking and writing skills relevant to planning, development, and global policy. Designed for graduate students and advanced undergraduates.
Medicine & Society Biomedicine plays a profound role in shaping social phenomena. It informs how we conceptualize ourselves, how we care for others, the ethical dilemmas we confront, and our global political engagements. Through case studies on topics such as addiction, organ transplants, and infectious disease, students explore the socio-political, moral, and existential issues associated with biomedicine, while also developing theoretical and methodological tools they can use to conduct their own person-centered investigations of afflictions and treatments in the US and around the world. Students leave this course with an appreciation for how social and political processes shape health and disease outcomes, as well as how culture is revealed and produced as people pursue and receive medical care.
Transnational Latin America This course introduces students to the diverse cultures of Latin America by exploring key issues that shape Latin America’s international relations as well as everyday life for specific local populations. Topics we explore include: race and gender inequalities, urban crime and insecurity, social movements, state terrorism, and the traffic of drugs and people across borders. By the end of this course, students will have developed greater insight into dynamics of everyday life in Latin America, the region’s place in the larger world, and how social problems in the region can be more thoughtfully addressed.