Passionate, award-winning educator
My teaching builds on my expertise in economic geography and urban studies. I am passionate about engaging students in new ideas that deepen their understanding of the world around them. In 2021, the UC Berkeley Academic Senate Committee on Teaching honored me with an “Extraordinary Teaching in Extraordinary Times” award, which recognizes instructors who used innovative methods to engage and support students to do excellent work amid the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Platform Geographies
My platform geographies course for undergraduates encourages students to think expansively and relationally about geographies produced and reproduced by digital platforms. We engage contemporary theories of city-hinterland relations and urbanization at the peripheries in order to explore how the digital is reshaping urban/city and rural/peripheral/hinterland space—and the relationship between these geographies.
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Critical Economic Geographies
In my economic geography course for undergraduates, I want students to understand capitalism as a globally differentiated system that is constructed, maintained, rescued, and challenged on an ongoing basis; in other words, I seek to denaturalize “the economy” as a domain with its own natural laws by focusing on capitalism as a practical accomplishment rife with power relations. I design practical, hands-on exercises to give students opportunities to apply and translate theoretical and conceptual material.
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Global Metropolitan Studies
I co-teach a graduate-level gateway course for the designated emphasis in Global Metropolitan Studies. Covering theories, histories, and methods of global metropolitan studies, the course juxtaposes interdisciplinary texts on themes such as displacement, global urban hierarchies, urban infrastructure, smart cities, and more.