Teaching

Human geography invites us to think about the relationship between people and place. My courses examine racialization as a central principle to how we make our society through where we live, where we work, and where we play.  In the US, this means grappling with segregation – not a short history of Jim Crow laws, but a set of practices and policies that are the spatialization of white supremacy in our daily lives. I hope that my classes can be a space where students move from abolition as a hashtag to a set of consensus-based community practices to address harms and keep each other safe.

Black women march with signs in front of Whispering Pines Sanitary Landfill

Environmental Justice

I am teaching Environmental Justice in UCSD Communication as COMM 146 in Winter 2025. In this class, students examine how people disproportionately impacted by environmental harms mobilize across social groups including race and immigration status for environmental justice where they live, work and play. Drawing on social movements, scientific students and legal cases, we will explore theories and practices of race, nature and climate change.

  • Environmental Justice

    Undergraduate course where students examine how poor people of color mobilize against environmental racism and climate change.

  • Abolition Geography

    If police don’t keep us safe, who does? Abolition is not only about slavery; it has always been about the promise of liberation. In this class, we will explore abolition geographies – radical place-making to create community well-being that does not rely on harming others.

  • Race, Nature, Power

    This class explores the role that racial formations and unequal power relations play in the cultural, political and spatial production of nature across three themes: land, body politics and relations of repair.

  • Race & Radical Placemaking

    This graduate seminar brings multidisciplinary approaches to racial formation and radical placemaking, centering on new books in human geography. Students will engage with book-length monographs that demonstrate the importance of relational placemaking in Black, queer, Latinx and/or Indigenous communities. To build new theories, we will also grapple with authors’ positionalities and different methods employed including classic ethnography and archival work, and building out cohort-focused group interviews, storymaps, and drawing constellated neighborhood memories.

    (Image from book cover for Carbon Sovereignty)