Engaged Teaching
As an educator in higher education, my goal is to strengthen how students understand and connect with inequality, difference, and global and local structures of power through facilitating a deeper engagement with lived experience across geographic contexts. By incorporating historically marginalized voices, including subaltern, Indigenous, and postcolonial intellectuals, writers, and ethnographic filmmakers, I aim to inspire students to raise their consciousness about how difference is thought about, experienced, and rendered meaningful across place, time, and culture.
Two engaged teaching courses I have led include: Migrant Women’s Political Activism: Global Perspectives and Reimagining Refugee Resettlement
Migrant Women’s Political Activism
This engaged learning course examines the tools, ideas, and practices of migrant women-led political activism both historically and in the present day. We begin with the question of what insights do we gain when we foreground human mobility (i.e. migration) and gender in our understandings of political and social change? We look at the ways in which migrant women throughout the world have organized and mobilized around a range of causes and ideas, from political inclusion to decolonization to racial justice to reproductive freedom, among many others. Their experiences are a window into different ideas of what counts as a social movement, solidarity, intersectionality, and justice. Through examining the writings of migrant women activists alongside texts and media in anthropology, history, and cultural theory, we ask what such efforts can teach us about migrant women's roles in long-standing struggles for human flourishing and equality. Throughout the semester, we are joined by guest lecturers who discuss their own creative work, activism, and how art meets the political.
Through focusing on trajectories of activism that are non-linear (such as transnational feminism), we also ask how political solidarities and projects form across national boundaries. By privileging the voices of women from the global South who have experienced different aspects of migration, from the refugee camp, to the detention center, to resettlement, to citizenship (broadly defined), students develop an introductory understanding of how gender and political recognition intersect to produce specific ideals around social justice that are emerging in the wake of the human fallout of racial capitalism, neo-imperial wars, and protracted global conflict. Other questions this course examines include:
What does it mean to address social injustice in the aftermath of displacement, migration, resettlement, and ongoing material and political uncertainty?
How do migrant women and the communities to which they are attached, create a sense of place in situations of political transition, material precarity, and cultural marginalization?
How do the enduring legacies of settler colonialism and imperialism impact what equality, justice, and community well-being look like for migrant communities today?
What are the possibilities and limitations of political dissent, resistance, refusal, rejection, and disruption in building new liberatory imaginaries and futures?
The class culminates in a digital project in which students mobilize the power of writing, multimedia, and creative expression in order to spotlight a migrant women-led social movement or collective that has reimagined what political dissent, participation, and future building look like. Their work is featured as part of a digital archive that students and I have created about immigrant lives, histories, and current realities called “Beyond Refuge: Migrants Reimagining the Political.” This website is an opportunity to move beyond the narrative that migrants are simply seeking safety and refuge from harrowing circumstances, and are not also meaningful participants of civil society. The website serves as a living and breathing digital archive that showcases examples of immigrant women’s empowerment, both in the present or historically.
Collecting these stories in one space is a way to resuscitate erased voices, stories, and narratives. It is a way of actively foregrounding historically marginalized voices and fundamentally rethinking the immigrant narrative as one that begins from a position of empowerment and consciousness rather than victimhood and passivity. We hope this can also act as the starting point for a larger archive that continues to highlight such stories.
Reimagining Refugee Resettlement
Refugee resettlement often connotes feelings of victory, arrival, the end of a long journey for safety. But for those who experience it, the resettlement process can also mark the beginning of a range of economic, cultural, and legal challenges. While organizations that help refugees establish new lives within their new home countries are critical sources of support, many refugee populations feel lost and uncertain about their futures once this organizational support dissipates. And yet, despite that, refugees find ways to persevere and reclaim control of their futures as aspiring citizens and members of society.
What is the experience of arrival like? Does including refugees into the social fabric require a complete rethinking of resettlement? This course examines the processes and experiences of what has come to be known as ‘refugee resettlement,’ from multiple perspectives. We examine the history of resettlement as a form of social welfare and legal protection under today’s global refugee regime. We also engage with texts and media that examine how migrants who have received refugee status actually experience cultural assimilation, belonging, and social life. Finally, through conversations with local practitioners and those based in other parts of the US and throughout the world, we examine the challenges of working with different populations of refugees. Engaging with practitioners reveals that refugee resettlement is not a straightforward humanitarian effort. Rather, it is deeply shaped by the larger political landscape and climate. Part of this will also entail getting to speak with people who identify as refugees and who have experienced the system itself.