TEACHING
Selections of syllabi and student projects from courses I've created and taught
Seminar "Domestic Speculation: Race, Gender & the American 'Home'"
Building of a digital open-source mapping platform, developed in GitHub and populated with student contributions to urban scholarship
Collegiate University Teaching Fellow, UCLA Humanities, Spring 2022
Thick mapping can be expanded as a strategy for communicating silences, when produced through collective efforts in a shared space. In her scholarship on open data and participatory digital collections, Dawn Childress argues for open access frameworks to move away from the singular and authoritative and toward the inclusive and speculative. Extending from this approach, an iteration of Childress’ “Flaneur” framework for GitHub was developed as a teaching tool for students in an architectural history seminar (by Author). Combining contemporary observation with historical research, students were asked to study the hidden narratives of oppression in the dominant architectures of the city, or the hidden architectures of the city oppressed by the dominant narrative. The collective project is featured on an interactive website, where users can select from a series of pins on a layered map. Each pin provides visual and textual content on a building environment that has been occluded by historical processes of erasure and displacement. The student projects focus on topics including gentrification, racially exclusive design and cultural expression. The project on gentrification in USC village, for example, highlights changes in the Insurance Maps of Los Angeles surrounding the college from its construction after 1894 to today. The shifting fabric helps us see gentrification not as a new issue, but as one that has roots in turn of the century visions of the city.
"Humanists for Spatial Justice" Seminar in "The Story of Now, Why Knowledge Matters"
Lecturer, Humanities Center, College of Arts and Sciences, University of San Diego, Summer 2021
The course explored how representations of the built environment (plans, maps and drawings) communicate power imbalances and racial and social beliefs. The construction of world empires depend on visual devices that have historically been used to disenfranchise, expropriate, segregate, otherize, and marginalize certain populations in service of imperial and capital growth. Lewis Henry Morgan’s iconic ‘Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines’ (1881), for example, presented a teleology of civilization associated with ethnographic observations of the built environment. His government sponsored depictions rendered Indigenous peoples as backward and obsolete, while promoting White Superiority. Interdisciplinary pedagogies and practices hold the power to destabilize these narratives in the making of more equitable, inclusive, and diverse physical and intellectual environments. The course focused on the "Urban Humanities," as a mode of inquiry--posed to inspire critical understandings of spatial environments and representations in the name of spatial justice.
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