My teaching is informed by my interests in making discourses of stratification, economic inequality and the vagaries of the dehumanization of the Enlightenment project legible in relation to questions that emerge within Postcolonial Gender and Sexuality Studies. These interests have pushed me to read and teach from bodies of scholarship that have theorized ‘racial capitalism’ in the West and its cognate, ‘caste capitalism’ in South Asia. The ways in which these interests appear in my teaching are descriptive of my teaching philosophy, which is guided by a desire to make the relationship between my research and pedagogical interests as transparent as possible. Rather than offer students a view of research and ‘readings’ as static, foundational or objectively authoritative, I aim to make it clear that scholarship and knowledge evolve, sometimes rapidly, through the debates in which we are engaged via our own intellectual commitments.
I have developed and taught both introductory designed to bring students into the fields of Feminist, Queer and Trans Studies, as well as specialized upper level undergraduate and graduate seminars in Anthropology and Gender and Sexuality Studies. I prioritize teaching in a way that disrupts Global North/South paradigms, by emphasizing the consolidation of literatures as a discursive exercise produced across geographic and historical encounters. This means that I offer work from variously located colleagues and literatures to add to a certain discursive narrative and critique, rather than offering Northern scholarship as foundational, while rendering Southern scholarship as r localized or historically idiosyncratic. My teaching style and content has been facilitated by opportunities to teach in many different contexts, including academic, policy and activist spaces, in the US, India, and Europe. A representative list of courses taught is below. Syllabi are available upon request.
SELECTED COURSES TAUGHT (SYLLABI AVAILABLE ON REQUEST)
Graduate Seminars
Worlds of Migration
Queer Ethnography
Race, Class and Capital
Gender and Sexuality in South Asia: Nationalism
Decolonial and Postcolonial Theories of Gender and Sexuality
Undergraduate Seminars
LGBTQ Politics and Postcolonialism
Anthropology of Postcolonialism
Marx and the Subject of the Global South
Anthropology of Sexuality
Politics of Gender, Sexuality and Development in South Asia
Undergraduate Survey Courses
Introduction to Sexuality and Transgender Studies: Social Movements
Transnational Sexuality Studies
Gender, Sexuality and Culture
Introduction to Sexuality Studies
Gender and Difference: Critical Analyses