Teaching
SOC 384 / STS 384: Technology and Social Change (Winter 2025, Winter 2026, Winter 2027, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor)
Today, we live in a period of rapid technological change. To make sense of this current moment, this course looks to the past. The goals of this course are to (1) introduce students to concepts and frameworks that push students to think critically about the relationship between technology, politics, economics, and social change; while (2) equipping students with historical knowledge that puts the present moment in broader historical perspective and empowers students to form their own opinions about the relationship between technology, social change, and the human good.
To these ends, this course proceeds in three “passes.” In the first pass, students are introduced to the interdisciplinary field of Science and Technology Studies (STS). In the second pass, students then apply these concepts to examine a series of nineteenth century social technological transformations, from the impact of railroads and the factory system on the worlds of work and politics, to the role of the postal service in stimulating new conceptions of the self. Finally, in a third pass, this course turns to the present day to discuss today’s knowledge economy.
Download the full syllabus here.
SOC 102: Introduction to Sociology – Social Dislocations (Fall 2026, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor)
Through processes of socialization individuals learn how to produce and reproduce the social order, as well as their positions therein. What happens, then, when individuals are dislocated from the social worlds they have been prepared to inhabit?
This course introduces students to the field of sociology through a series of ethnographic and interview-based studies examining individuals, communities, and organizations navigating our changing society. Topics covered will include inequality and social mobility; transformations in the nature of work and new geographies of opportunity and decline; global issues of migration, (il)liberalism, development, and national belonging; and the role of gender and race within these processes. By being invited to inhabit social worlds foreign to their own, students will learn how to question what is taken for granted in social life and “think like a sociologist.”
SOC 190 American State Formation in Critical Perspective (Spring 2022, UC Berkeley Department of Sociology)
The traditional narrative of American history is that the United States was a revolutionary experiment in liberal democracy. While scholarly and public awareness of the limitations of this narrative have grown, no consensus has emerged on an alternative framework for understanding American political development. This course has two main goals: (1) to introduce students to the sociological study of the state via a detailed examination of the United States; and (2) to stimulate students to critically consider the politics of knowledge production and become more critical interpreters of scholarship and history. To these ends, this course will be structured in two main parts. In the first, students will be introduced to classical sociological approaches to state formation and scholarship situating the United States in the context of these classical approaches; in the second, students will place these classical approaches in critical and comparative perspective with literature foregrounding how empire, slavery, and settler colonialism influenced American political development and bringing in a postcolonial critique to how the narrative of American history is told. Throughout, students will be asked a series of questions that will stimulate them to critically reflect on the assumptions, biases, and blindspots of each perspective.
Download the full syllabus here.
SOC 190 Introduction to Political Economy: Society, Space, and Transformation in the San Francisco Bay Area (Spring 2019, UC Berkeley Department of Sociology)
How does the organization of economic production and exchange affect other areas of social life? And how is the economy itself a socially embedded institution? As residents of the Bay Area, we are experiencing the ongoing, global transformation of capitalism from a particularly privileged vantage point. From urban restructuring to precarious work to neoliberal self- governance, reverberations of the emerging knowledge economy are visible throughout our everyday lives. This course has two main goals: (1) to give students an introduction to a sociological perspective on political economy; and (2) to challenge students to critically interrogate their own lived experience in the Bay Area as a reflexive entry-point into larger political economic questions. To these ends, after using Marx, Polanyi, and Weber to lay a groundwork in classical political economy, this course will be organized around two themes— the production of space and the production of economic agents — as focused lenses into the literature and for student reflection.
Download the full syllabus here.