Teaching

The classroom is not only a place for students to examine their daily lives but a stage to foster and nurture a healthy critique of academic disciplines and practices. In this place, and on this stage, I guide students to:

1. Apply theories and methods to assess, challenge, and transform the logic and practices of knowledge production inside and outside of the academy. Social theory has provided many with the framework to decipher and act in times of profound uncertainty. I have designed my curriculum to equip students to use sets of knowledge to transform our current social moment. 
2. Center the contributions made by individuals and communities who are not usually recognized or considered valid by those in the mainstream. I achieve this by exposing students to theoretical and methodological gaps in academic texts and guiding them to fill those exclusions with Global South scholarship and subaltern communities’ sabidurias (wisdom), conocimientos (knowledge), and expertise.
3. Value their own and others’ experiential knowledge and its role in creating social theory. I empower students to reflect on how personal experiences have the same epistemological power as any other set of existing discourses. I ask studets to remain “critically vigilant” (hooks 2003) regarding the ways that social positionality influences knowledge creation and dissemination. 
4. Restructure the concepts and practices of social justice and collective responsibility towards the creation of a “mundo … donde quepan muchos mundos (a world where many other worlds may fit in)” (EZLN 1994). I encourage students to connect with different groups, assess existing paradigms and practices, honor new ideas, and empower others to engage in transforming society at large.