B.A. Individualized Interdepartmental Studies, University of Minnesota
M.A. Culture, Globalization and the City, Goldsmiths College, University of London
Ph.D. Geography, The Graduate Center, The City University of New York

• BIS 180 Introduction to Human Geography
• BIS 218 The Power of Maps
• BIS 340 Approaches to Cultural Research
• BIS 365 Institutions and Social Change
• BIS 406 Urban Geography and Planning
• BISSTS 307 Science, Technology, and Society

Here are some things I value, consider important for people, view as necessary to the kind of world I want to live in, encourage in my teaching, and in turn strive to offer students:

• Care
• Capacities for sustained attention and focus
• Intentional, purposefully cultivated habits of thought and practice
• A belief that doubting, questioning, and not knowing for certain are often preferable to certitude
• A recognition that everybody holds valuable knowledge and can do significant things, that these things can be of great consequence in lives and in the world, and that we owe it to ourselves and one another to act as if this is true by always radically questioning what we know, how we know, and what we—both individually and collectively—can and might do, in whose interests, to meet whose needs
• An understanding that true learning is often quite difficult, even uncomfortable, but worth doing exactly because it strengthens our capacity to do hard things (including enacting all the things already listed above!)
• A conviction that people, issues, ideas, and information are complex, nuanced, and often require deep context to begin to understand
• Awareness that, in light of the above, there is much to be gained from approaching interactions with others not as moments to broadcast ourselves and/or win others to our positions, but as opportunities to learn who we are, where we are positioned in relation to others, and start figuring out how to build relations that live up to people’s best potentials
• An alertness to the fact that there are powerful interests currently aligned against and actively eroding many, perhaps all the values outlined above, and that the future—again, both individually and collectively—may depend in no small part on people’s abilities to put them into practice.

I approach teaching as process of trying to keep up the hard work, in the spirit of the above.

Technically, I studied human geography and urban studies in school. But I’ve also got keen interests in cultural studies, science and technology studies, critical social thought, art, and more, and all these elements are present in different strands of my work and how I spend my time. Moreover, the values that infuse my teaching also infuse my research and writing, and vice versa. In those contexts, I’m increasingly interested in experimenting with place-based collaborative methods (including oral histories, mapping and geo-visual methods, and other qualitative approaches) with different co-thinkers and processes of community-embedded collective study and knowledge production. I’m currently working on projects addressing “smart” urbanism and planning, commons and commoning, localist production, counter-narratives and capacities in the face of gentrification and displacement, mutual aid and ideas of distributed burden, genetic variation and cancer, and more. For a more detailed sense of my work, please see the CV and/or the personal website linked above.