Anthropologist, Professor, and User Experience Researcher.
My formative period as an anthropologist and gender studies scholar began during a freshman seminar on Society and Human Variation with my soon-to-be mentor. At the time, I was not an anthropology major, but I was drawn to the discipline’s themes of cultural relativism and extended ethnography. Looking back, the roots of my critical lens were established much earlier through personal experiences, however it was through this seminar course that I began to develop the tools to not only understand my own positionality, but also to question power relations and think critically about the sociocultural landscape we live in. Critical theory helped me to make the connections between the personal and the political. It is this experience as a student that informs my perspectives towards teaching and on the role university professors may have in fostering student success and holistic development.
While my teaching is grounded in anthropological and critical gender theory and methodology, I aim to empower students with an intellectual toolkit that will be broadly applicable to other areas of academic study and useful in their personal lives. I recognize that not every student I teach will major in gender studies, anthropology, or ethnic studies, but all students can benefit from the disciplines’ insistence on the equity and integrity of all cultures and peoples, and the tools to critically engage within the world at home and abroad.
I teach a range of undergraduate and graduate courses including the following:
In addition, I also mentor undergraduate and graduate students whose research interests align broadly with my areas of expertise in Science Studies, Black Feminisms, Applied Anthropology and Postsecondary STEM/Computing learning.