Lecturer
B.A. Psychology, Boston College
M.St. Women’s Studies, Oxford University
M.P.A. Evans School of Public Affairs, University of Washington
Ph.D. Women’s Studies, University of Washington
Office: UW1-249
Email: kleissle@uw.edu
Mailing: Box 358563, 18115 Campus Way NE, Bothell, WA 98011-8246
Teaching
No matter what topic I am teaching, one goal is always a constant in my pedagogy: fostering in my students the critical skills to further the cause of social justice. My courses tend to examine issues of inequality – for example, global trade imbalances between first and Third worlds, histories of imperialism, or contemporary struggles around race, class, and gender – around which we develop, as a class, the skills of inclusion, empathy, and dialogue that help us to both broaden and deepen our understanding of social relations. With that in mind, I emphasize the value of social construction theory in combating limiting forms of essentialism; transnational approaches that encourage us to traverse multiple scales of analysis; and feminist analytics that raise our awareness of everyday forms of privilege and disadvantage.
Recent Courses Taught
BCUSP 107 Cross-cultural Mediascapes: Coffee
BCUSP 107 Thinking Beyond Borders: Philosophical Explorations of Science Fiction
BCUSP 115 Chocolate: A Global Inquiry
BCUSP 118 Luxury Lives: Consumerism in the 21st Century
BIS 264 Africa on Film
BIS 282 Globalization
BIS 490 Economics of Ice: Globalization and the Polar Regions
BISGST 397 Gender and Globalization
SISAF 490 Political Economy of Africa (UW Seattle, African Studies)
Research/Scholarship
My research areas are, broadly, feminist international political economy, development studies, global trade, and sub-Saharan Africa, especially that continent’s political-agricultural and colonial histories. Specifically, my work has been on the cocoa-chocolate commodities trade between West Africa and Europe. I have looked at the gendering of the “figure” of the cocoa farmer in Ghana and in Britain, through advertising, food culture, political rhetoric, and macro-economic policies, particularly structural adjustment. I also enjoy thinking and writing about the representation of West Africa in high-end chocolate marketing, and its relationship to the material production of cocoa in that region of the world.