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My teaching philosophy fosters spaces where students can connect feminist scholarship with real-world situations. To achieve this, I prioritize a human-centered approach to education and emphasize community-engaged learning and digital methods. Drawing upon my teaching and research experience, I have also come to deeply value cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary conversations, both inside and outside classrooms. I teach courses addressing gender-based violence, transnational feminism(s), reproductive justice, East Asian societies, and global popular culture. Below is the course description and highlights of the courses I taught.
Reproductive Justice: Beyond Abortion
What is reproduction across different political and cultural landscapes? What is reproduced through reproduction? What does it mean to have or lose control over your body, your family, and your future? This seminar explores reproductive justice as more than just abortion rights. From sterilization and maternal mortality to queer family-making, contraceptive politics, and parenting under surveillance, we’ll examine how race, gender, class, sexuality, disability, and immigration shape who gets to have children, who doesn’t, and who gets to parent safely. Drawing on scholarship, films, and real-world case studies, this seminar invites you to think critically and globally about the power, politics, and possibilities of reproductive freedom.
To the right are the cover pages of the handbooks that students drafted for pregnant teens in West Virginia and Utah.
Gender in East Asia
This seminar explores how Asian people of different genders have historically and contemporarily engaged with feminist thought and activism and navigated systemic disparities within their communities and in transnational contexts, as well as their daily lives and experiences. Geographically, we focus on societies influenced by Confucian gender norms, specifically those of China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. In this course, we examine both the intergender differences and the intragender variations. We will start with theoretical and historical foundations and then explore topics such as gendered popular culture, the workplace, and the family.
To the left is the front page of a story map students created using ArcGIS StoryMap.
A consent education workshop designed for junior and senior students
A consent education workshop designed for junior and senior students
Sexual Assault Intervention
One in five women in the United States has experienced completed or attempted rape in their lifetime. Nearly a quarter of men in the U.S. have experienced some form of contact sexual violence. The prevalence rate among the transgender and non-binary population is even higher. However, only 25% of sexual assaults are reported to the police, with merely 2% to 6% of reported cases leading to a conviction. Where does rape culture originate? What influence has the media had? What is wrong with the current framework for sexual assault intervention? Are there alternatives? Students can find answers and be a part of trauma-informed sexual assault advocacy in the class through a partnership with Project Horizon, a recognized leader in efforts to address domestic and sexual violence, the Title IX office at W&L, and local law enforcement agencies.
A handbook for students studying abroad
A handbook for students studying abroad
Gender-based Violence
This course examines gender-based violence (GBV) from a feminist perspective. You will be introduced to a myriad of domestic and international GBV issues, from interpersonal violence (i.e., pornography, sex work, human trafficking, rape, and intimate partner violence) to structural violence (i.e., GBV in conflict areas, honor killing, genital mutilation, and forced marriage). The course is contextualized in Crenshaw's perspective of intersectionality. GBV is understood as occurring in a social context of power, dominance, and control as a co-factor of gender, race/ethnicity, socioeconomic class, age, sexuality, nationality, and other variables. The seminar is designed to enhance students' understanding of important GBV research topics and scholarly debates and, furthermore, facilitate the application of this knowledge to real-world settings. We will discuss ongoing controversies about the causes and effects of GBV and examine the sociological, cultural, political, and legal discourses surrounding these issues. The GBV seminar is composed of seminar sessions on Tuesdays and lab sessions on Thursdays. In the lab sessions, we will work collectively to complete the “Contemporary Underground Railway” project using ArcGIS.
Below is the digital map that students created to investigate domestic violence services in the Deep South.
Feminism and Global Pop Culture
Why does Nami in One Piece always wear a bikini top? Why did the news that Hallie Bailey was going to play the role of the little mermaid raise heated discussion on social media? What message does Beyoncé’s Lemonade convey? Or, in general, how does pop culture reinforce and/or challenge race, gender, and sexuality norms? Those are the questions that we will discuss in this course.
This course is interested in honing the critical skills necessary to analyze the pop culture that surrounds us every day. This course takes as a foundational assumption that we still live in a world where, while there may be some improvement, racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia are alive and well. As such, the pop culture produced and consumed in different societies plays a part in those systems of oppression and domination. At the same time, pop culture can also be used as a powerful tool to challenge those systems. With the popularity of Internet-based social media, the problematic and innovative portrayals of the gendered, sexualized, and racialized bodies in pop culture transcend national and cultural boundaries. We will explore the social construction of gender, sexuality, and race in pop culture from different societies.
Below are some popular culture items that students made to challenge problematic representations of gender, race, sexuality, and class in global popular culture.
Introduction to Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies
What is gender? What is sexuality? Are these categories inborn or a product of society? How are gender and sexuality interconnected with race, ethnicity, class, nationality, migration status, and languages? These are the central questions at the heart of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. This introductory course aims to tackle these questions through a life course approach. We will collectively “experience” how gender, race, and sexuality are socially and culturally constructed, from children’s play and educational experiences to formal and informal employment in various workplaces, intimate relationships, and reproduction. Remember: this is not a “standard” life course for any individual. In each of these realms, we examine sexuality, race, and gender on multiple levels, from interpersonal interactions to systematic inequalities. Additionally, and maybe most importantly, gender or any social category is always contingent, depending on the historical, political, cultural, and economic, and national context. Consequently, this course explores gender and sexuality in a global setting and from a cross-cultural perspective.
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