Teaching

 

My teaching focuses broadly on the intersection of Latin America and the Caribbean, International Development, and the Environment through a critical anthropological lens.

I currently teach courses at both the master’s and undergraduate level on International Development and the Politics of Environmental Conservation. I also teach on bureaucracy and science and technology studies. I have taught at the doctoral, master’s, and undergraduate levels.

Teaching Philosophy

My courses revolve around a set of debates that students entertain week after week. For a course on development, this often means reading the arguments from multiple practitioners or theorists to understand the terms and assumptions of each. For a course on conservation, it may revolve around a particular policy and the perspectives on that policy held by different disciplines or philosophies. 

A large part of my teaching has also been experiential. I have led a practicum course to Costa Rica for 5 years, bringing students from AU together with students from the Norwegian University for Life Sciences (NMBU) and the University for Peace (Costa Rica) to examine the social and environmental impacts of pineapple plantations in southwest Costa Rica. Students have worked with small holding farmers to develop research questions that have examined the industry or alternative agroecological practices that hold promise for farmers. 

I am particularly interested in critiques that existing forms of grading may be evaluating students not on what they learned in my class, but what they have learned previously. For that reason, I have used labor based grading, and grading specifications. I have worked with classes based on each of these grading systems and am continually seeking forms of assessment that encourage students to learn and explore outside of a system that punishes some types of learners and rewards others. 

Current Courses

Graduate

  • Practicum: Political ecology of Pineapple/Water in Costa Rica

  • Introduction to International Development

  • Politics of Environmental Conservation

Undergraduate

  • The Making of Scientific Change

  • Global Inequality and Development

  • Bureaucracy and Inequality, American University