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Teaching

Fall 2022
Davidson College
Department of Anthropology


Introduction to Cultural Anthropology

Religion, Society & Culture

 

Winter 2022
Fordham University

Department of Sociology & Anthropology

Economic Theologies

As we face the interconnected crises of neoliberal austerity measures, job precarity, and debt, a number of social theorists have turned to theology to justify their vision for a post-work, post-debt society. Seemingly ancient and apolitical concepts like the “Sabbath” and the “Jubilee” have been refunctioned to justify global debt forgiveness and to imagine a world without work. Why do these texts hold so much power? How are these thinkers retooling and reinterpreting ancient religious texts to address today’s global economic crises? Where do we situate their arguments in a longer genealogy of social thought concerned with the relationship between “religion” & “economy”? The course will also turn to recent work in anthropological canon, offering alternative religious and cosmological models for imagining work and rest, (re)distribution and recognition, prosperity and austerity, debt, credit, and charity.

Fall 2021 
Fordham University
Department of Sociology & Anthropology

Ghettos & Gated Communities

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Spring 2020
University of Michigan
Department of Anthropology


Fake News & the Anthropology of Ignorance

As reports of fake news & foreign interference in the 2016 election capture the American imagination, interest in the study of ignorance (“Agnotology”) has reignited. Rather than structuring itself around knowledge, this course flips the script. How does attending to the study of ignorance, rather than to the study of knowledge, allow us to better understand the world we inhabit? What precisely is ignorance? Is it simply the absence of knowledge? Or should we view it as its own domain of (non-)knowledge?

Students will trace the genealogy of ignorance in the ethnographic imagination—from classic debates about the capacities of the “native mind” to contemporary debates about Russian interference and the proliferation of fake news. Each session will offer a different lens to parse the multiple and often contested meanings of the term. In so doing, it will permit students various entry-points to explore major anthropological conversations and debates about: secrecy and initiation, memory and oblivion, ideology and power, racial privilege and denial, and dissimulation and (in)sincerity. These abstract concepts will be introduced to students through grounded ethnographic vignettes of everyday interaction.

During the semester, students will refine their analytical skills. Rather than taking ignorance at face value, they will be asked to critically engage the term. How can claiming ignorance, for example, be strategic? While power is often bundled with knowledge (“knowledge is power”), “ignorance” can also be harnessed to consolidate power and promote particular interests.

Additional Teaching Experience

Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan

Graduate Student Instructor

Fall 2019 & Fall 2016: Critical Theory in Medicine & Healing

Winter 2017 & Fall 2015: Introduction to Anthropology

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