(Teaching)

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I am writing to express my heartfelt gratitude for being such a wonderful professor. I have been in college for seven years, and I have never had a professor who cared so much about their students. Your passion for anthropology and architecture along with your dedication to teaching is truly inspiring. I found the class extremely stimulating and thought-provoking. The concept of designing for other species was something new and exciting, and it challenged me to think about architecture differently. Your enthusiasm and knowledge of the subject matter were evident in every lecture, and I found myself looking forward to each class. I was particularly impressed by the way you cared for your students and the class’s success. I appreciate the time and effort you took to ensure that we understood the material and were engaged in the learning process.

(M.Arch Student, University of Pennsylvania, 2023)

PHILOSOPHY

As an anthropologist who studies architecture, design is not simply an object of critique for me; it is also an educational tool, a means to empower students to transform unjust worlds. Across my courses, I use design pedagogies of multi-modal creation to give form to anthropology’s poetic capacity to imagine life “otherwise.” By pairing reflexive design practices with ethnographic analyses of material culture attuned to the politics of artifacts, I turn other modes of being (more-than) human that are latent in the anthropological archive into prototypes of better futures.

I believe this hybrid praxis can become a method of hope: At a time of political fatalism and ecological nihilism, I couple anthropological knowing and design making to cultivate a sense of possibility in students. In my article in Teaching and Learning Anthropology, I argue that this pragmatic and experimental approach can instill a disposition toward change—an attitude of re-form—that confronts the social and environmental crises of the 21st century head-on. I believe that higher education today must be as affective and ethical as it is epistemic and technical. As a professor, I nurture ways of feeling and responding, alongside proficiencies in critical thinking and empirical inquiry, to help my students enact what Anand Pandian has described as our “humanity-yet-to-come.”

COURSES