New courses at UC San Diego

I am looking forward to teaching several new courses at UC San Diego in the coming months.

This winter, I am teaching a course originally designed by Dr. Tom Humphries. The Problem of Voice takes the trope of “voice” as an important mode of understanding representation, recognition, and multivocality in contemporary cultural perspectives. The course, in the Department of Communication, asks upper level undergraduates to read and discuss social theory, autobiography, and fiction in order to interrogate the question of who gets to speak on behalf of an identity group, how to reconcile internal diversity, and how speakers establish authority, authenticity, and what counts as “truth”.

In spring 2017, I will teach another course in Communication, Performance and Cultural Studies, and a course in the Department of Anthropology, Ethnography in Practice.

Ethnography in Practice is a practicum for upper level undergraduates, in which each student picks a field site and over the course of the quarter researches, analyzes, presents to peers, and writes an original ethnography. The course is appropriate for undergraduate anthropology majors, but also for communication majors and writing majors interested in taking observation of real life events into compelling, rigorously thought-out writing. Ethnography as a practice first and foremost seeks to represent the insider’s point of view to describe or translate a cultural scene to others. We will read examples of written ethnography to explore the practice of ethnography as a genre and practice of writing, learn how to write, organize and analyze ethnographic field notes, and follow a contemporary adaptation of the Spradley method of conducting and analyzing ethnographic interviews.

Performance and Cultural Studies is in the Communication Department and cross-listed with the Russian, Eurasian, and Eastern European Studies (REEES) major and minor. The course begins from the question of what performance is, and what it does, as a form of dialogic communication. We will discuss a variety of genres of performance in cultural contexts, engage core texts of performance studies, and draw on examples of how performances can be mobilized as political resistance. Students will participate in workshops to develop a performative term project. REEES majors and minors must chose examples and subject matter related to the major for their term project (in addition to relevant material throughout the course).

Finally, during UC San Diego’s Summer Session I 2017, I will offer an upper level undergraduate course on Queer & Crip Theory for the Program in Critical Gender Studies.  This course takes a critical, contemporary approach to understanding disability and sexuality.

Read more here.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s