Teaching
Teaching Philosophy
I believe in the transformative power of integrative and experiential learning to make sociological concepts tangible and relevant to students' lives. I design interactive learning environments where theory comes alive through collaborative investigation and creative application. Below are select examples from three of my undergraduate courses.
Courses
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Technology & Society
How science and technology shape social life, and how social forces shape science and technology in return. Topics include recognition, inequality, AI governance, and algorithmic systems.
Sociology of Gender
How gender shapes experience across education, work, family, and relationships, and how it intersects with other dimensions of social inequality.
Introduction to Social Statistics
A survey of fundamental statistical concepts and their application in social research, with emphasis on both conceptual understanding and practical analysis skills.
Sociology of Culture
Key frameworks in the sociology of culture, including cultural industries, taste, status, and the boundary between popular and high culture. Students analyze everyday cultural objects through a sociological lens.
University of Arizona
Why So Few? Women in the Professions
God in the Movies
Sociology of Popular Culture
Selected Classroom Activities
Sociology of Culture
Cultural Capital Scavenger Hunt
Students map their campus environment to identify how institutional resources are distributed along class-coded lines, drawing on Anthony Jack's research on first-generation students.
Subculture Balloon Debate
Teams represent stigmatized subcultures and use theoretical tools to argue for their group's legitimacy, navigating between analytical rigor and rhetorical performance.
Meme Creation Contest
Students translate sociological concepts into visual form and analyze what makes a concept-driven meme culturally legible and shareable.
Sociology of Gender
Meme-Busters
Students construct evidence-based counter-memes to challenge essentialist claims, practicing critical engagement with popular discourse about gender.
Leadership Fashion Runway
Students curate visual representations of gendered professional norms and present them analytically, surfacing the social regulation of bodies in professional contexts.
Time Travelers
Groups write fictional letters from 1950s time travelers confused by modern work-family arrangements; peers respond with sociologically informed analysis connecting personal experience to institutional change.
Technology & Society
Recognition Bingo
Students use structured gameplay to examine how scientific credit accumulates unequally, mapping advantage and disadvantage onto the social conditions of knowledge production.
AI in Daily Life Diaries
Students document their everyday encounters with algorithmic systems, then analyze them as a class to surface patterns in how AI shapes choice and perception.
Digital Divide Stackers
Groups construct physical representations of differential technology access, making structural inequality in digital infrastructure materially visible.