My teaching philosophy centers helping students make sociological concepts transferable to the “real world.”

Students in my courses should learn to use their “sociological imagination” in which they put themselves in someone else’s figurative shoes by imagining how personal biography and contextual history combine to produce social outcomes (Mills 1959). Specifically, I hope students interrogate the values of their culture and communities, their own social position therein, and the various sites of privilege and oppression they simultaneously occupy. By examining their own lives in relation to assigned texts, they are better able to examine the production of knowledge itself and begin to read and write more critically; students begin to wonder about the values, positions, privileges, and oppressions relevant to the authors they’re reading and engaging with.

Courses Taught

Northwestern University

• Environment and Society

• Sociology of Disaster

• Masculinities and Society

• Sociology of Gender

• Gender, Health, and Medicine

• Gender, Race, Class, and Reality TV