2024-25, Harvard University
Climate Justice, Spring 2025, Click for Tentative Reading List
Given the urgent need to shift societies away from carbon-based energy, how can such transitions occur so as not to reproduce existing injustices? Answering this question requires an interdisciplinary research strategy. Students will read and learn how sociologists, anthropologists, political theorists, political scientists, historians, and literary scholars address questions of climate change and a “just transition.” Our course will be oriented primarily around the following five questions, adapted from Catriona Mackinnon’s Climate Change and Political Theory: (1) Why have we not yet mobilized sufficiently to address climate change? (2) Who has primarily suffered from climate change—past, present, and future? (3) Who is responsible for climate injustice? Why has responsibility become, arguably, the central ethical and moral category in theories of climate justice? (4) What are our options in the face of climate failure? Who should respond, and how? (5) Geoengineering: Savior Technologies or Fantasies of Control?
Students will build their conceptual vocabulary, learn the strengths and limits of each disciplinary approach, and understand how to formulate compelling research questions, answers, and essays.
Climate Action, Fall 2024, First Year Seminar, Click for Syllabus
You are part of the so-called “pivotal generation” for preventing the worst effects of climate change. While global carbon emissions continue to rise yearly, there remains a small window of time for action. What options are available to you for responding to climate change and the unequal burdens it creates? This discussion-based seminar will introduce you to three prominent responses to climate change: (1) Institutional Action (2) Social Movement Action, and (3) Climate Aesthetics. We will learn about these responses through an interdisciplinary set of texts from the social sciences and humanities. In addition to introducing you to the substantive content and debates around these forms of action, you will complete assignments that enable you to develop skills in academic writing, in interviewing, and in evaluating art objects and exhibits. Your final project will give you the choice to produce a longer essay, an interview, or an art review or project. You can expect to build your conceptual vocabulary, learn the strengths and limits of each form of action, and understand how to formulate compelling written and visual modes of communication.
Introduction to Social Theory, Fall 2024 - Spring 2025 (Email me for course and section syllabus)
Fall Semester: Hobbes-Marx
Spring Semester: Nietzsche-Butler
2023-24, Harvard University
Climate Justice, Spring 2024, Click here for Spring 2024 Syllabus
See Spring 2024 description above
Introduction to Social Theory, Fall 2023 - Spring 2024 (Email me for course and section syllabus)
Fall Semester: Hobbes-Marx
Spring Semester: Nietzsche-Butler
2022-23, Boston University
Introduction to Political Theory, Fall 2022, 100-level lecture, Click here for Syllabus
“How should we live?” According to scholar Jonathan Floyd, this is the organizing question that links the variety of writings, pamphlets, manifestos, and dialogues that are typically described as political theory. The question “how should we live?” Floyd argues, sets political theory apart from two different, yet related disciplines: moral philosophy, which asks, “how should I live?” and political science, which asks “how do we live?” Loosely oriented around Floyd’s organizing question, this course will introduce students to major debates and thinkers in political theory. More specifically, we will explore the dominant answer to Floyd’s question in the past four-hundred years, which is that “we” (variously construed) ought to live within, and be governed by, large, relatively circumscribed nation-states that can coerce, constrain and enable our lives in various ways. That is, the through-line linking the various readings in the course will be “the state.” Our course will examine three questions related to the modern state: (Unit 1) why do states govern us in the first place—what purposes do they serve? (Unit 2) what is the relationship between state and economy? (Unit 3) how does political change happen?
Classical to Early Modern Political Theory: Dilemmas of Inclusion and Exclusion, Fall 2022, 300-level seminar, Syllabus here
If political theory is primarily the attempt to answer the question, “how should we live?” then who gets included—and excluded—in this we? Via ancient and early modern thinkers, we will examine the broader question of how we should live and the more critical question of how boundaries are drawn around communities of “we.” What are the bounds of political community in ancient and early modern texts? What justifications do theorists provide for these boundaries? Does their reasoning make sense?
These questions matter today. Historical texts have contemporary significance, helping us see the roots of current ideas and institutions. They allow us to see continuity. On the other hand, centuries-old texts may also provide alternatives that are still viable but have been lost to history. That is, they may be discontinuous with the present but in ways that defamiliarize and provide alternatives to our current ways of living. In short, we will also make sure to consider the contemporary relevance (or irrelevance) of our texts by asking: how are ancient and early modern forms of inclusion and exclusion continuous or discontinuous with those of today?
Racial Capitalism and Settler Colonialism, Spring 2023, 500-level seminar, Click here for Syllabus
Patrick Wolfe describes settler colonialism as a “structure not an event.” Likewise, many scholars describe racial capitalism as a persistent, ongoing structure that exploits “difference” for the sake of profit. How might we best conceptualize not only these large scale structures, but their interaction? Students will examine core studies of settler colonialism and racial capitalism by Vine DeLoria, Cedric Robinson, and Iyko Day, among others, along with ongoing debates between scholars of antiblackness and scholars of Indigenous studies. Finally, students will examine the range of responses to these large scale structures, including Indigenous refusal, Black feminist care networks, and economic coalitions across various groups.
Nature and Politics, Spring 2023, 300-level seminar, Click here for Syllabus
Are our political institutions and ways of studying politics rooted in the Holocene era—an unusual epoch of planetary stability? If so, our basic concepts and modes of politics are likely to be slow to respond to the abrupt shifts in climate stability that are rapidly emerging. How might we think about political science, political theory, and political activism otherwise? What sorts of resources and conversations might be had across the social and natural sciences to address climate change? Students will read texts that potentially bridge these divides, from ancient to contemporary. Authors will include Lucretius, Aristophanes, Sophocles, Mary Shelley, Rachel Carson, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Bruno Latour, Jane Bennett, Lida Maxwell, William Connolly, Mike Davis, Chelsea Mikael Frazier, Leah Thomas, and Marcia Bjornerud.
I have designed and taught the following solo courses at Johns Hopkins University. In the Spring of 2021 I was nominated for an Excellence in Teaching Award at Johns Hopkins’ Krieger School of Arts and Sciences.
Structural Injustice, Fall 2020, Spring 2021, and Fall 2021, Click here for Syllabus
Politicians, social scientists, and philosophers speak increasingly of structural injustice and of the need for structural rather than incremental change. But what do they mean by “structural,” and what would make a structure “unjust”? How should we respond to structural injustice? In this writing course, we explore these questions through the work of contemporary scholars. For our first essay, students evaluate the persuasiveness of Iris Marion Young’s seminal 2004 essay “Responsibility and Global Labor Justice,” which analyzes sweatshop labor. Young argues that structural injustices are forms of disempowerment resulting from multiple social processes, none of which is the sole cause. We should respond, she proposes, by broadening who counts as complicit in perpetuating these injustices, focusing especially on affluent consumers in countries far from the site of production. The second essay asks students to evaluate the application of Young’s framework to a different phenomenon—colonialism. Students read Catherine Lu’s essay “Colonialism as Structural Injustice: Historical Responsibility and Contemporary Redress.” Lu uses Young’s theory to rethink who is responsible for Japanese colonial practices in South Korea during the Second World War. For the third and final essay, students enter into conversation about the role of the oppressed in contesting structural injustice. We read Clarissa Hayward’s essay “Responsibility and Ignorance,” which critiques Young’s responsibility model and argues for the oppressed to adopt a disruptive politics that employs spectacular direct actions to “wake up” complacent citizens. We also read Tamara Jugov and Lea Ypi’s argument that the oppressed have an obligation to resist structural injustice. By drawing on these sources, as well as previous readings, students argue their own view of how best to describe and respond to structural injustice.
The Politics of Personal Life: Work, Family, Consumption, Fall 2018 and Fall 2019 (click course title for syllabus)
This course explores various theoretical attempts to broaden the meaning of “politics” by examining three spheres of action typically equated with “personal” life: work, family, and consumption. The following questions orient our inquiry: what does the phrase “the personal is political” mean, and what sort of political solutions does it typically endorse? What can we learn about politics by studying family dynamics? Why do Americans work so much, and how does “work ethic” discourse promote punitive social policies? What is the relationship between our everyday acts of consumption and larger political phenomena such as climate change and racialization processes? What can theories of intersectionality tell us about such dynamics?
Introduction to Democratic Theory, Summer 2019 (click course title for syllabus)
Is democracy best understood as a form of government, or as "a way of life" that opposes the inertia and failures of state institutions? What is the difference between representative democracy and participatory democracy? How have political thinkers distinguished between a democracy and a republic? Does democracy require collective identity and if so, is it necessarily exclusionary? This course explores influential answers to these questions, from Rousseau to Martin Luther King, Jr. and beyond.
Other course syllabi that I’ve created and am prepared to teach (click title for syllabus):
Introduction to Democratic Theory: Afro-Modern Approaches (click course title for syllabus)
What is democracy? Who are “the people”? This course begins by introducing students to the central theoretical debates in contemporary democratic theory. It then turns to the vast body of writing known as Afro-Modern political thought to shed a critical lens on these contemporary debates, to see how democracy is theorized differently once the history of race and racism is considered.
Reproductive Freedom (click course title for syllabus)
This course takes its point of departure from Dorothy Roberts’s claim in Killing the Black Body that current notions of reproductive freedom need to be re-thought beyond liberal ideals of negative freedom. On Roberts’s account, negative liberty approaches privilege individual autonomy, minimal government interference in abortion decisions, and the perspectives of middle-class white women. She calls for a new framework—but what would it mean to rethink reproductive freedom towards what Roberts calls a “positive” notion of liberty? We start with Roberts’s own response, which focuses on the concept of “self-definition” and is meant to “encompass the full range of procreative activities.” We then move on to other theorists seeking to broaden conceptions of reproductive freedom, such as Simone de Beauvoir, Audre Lorde, Rosalind Petchesky, Angela Davis, and Silvia Federici; along the way we engage with questions regarding reproductive technology, reproductive labor, and the concept of “reproduction” itself.
Republicanism and Its Discontents (click course title for syllabus)
Republican political theory contains two imperatives: a drive to order and security on the one hand, and a tendency towards disruption and “regular innovation” on the other. This dual orientation accounts for its appeal and persistence over time. This course examines the wide variety of thinkers and political ideologies that have felt the pull of republicanism; we also assess the multiple criticisms that republicanism has received, especially regarding questions of freedom and power.