My teaching interests include global gender and sexuality, sociology and anthropology of work, feminist theory, qualitative methods, social inequality, and South Asia.
Please email me if you’d like a copy of any of my syllabi.
Gender and Sexuality in South Asia
Lewis & Clark College, Portland, Oregon. Spring 2023
This course explores contemporary dynamics related to gender and sexuality in South Asia at the level of the family, community, market, and the state in contemporary South Asia. While these scales of analysis will inform the course on the whole, the course will explore these thematic areas: caste, sexuality, religion, ethnicity, mobility, embodiment, tradition, modernity, and contemporary feminist movements. We will draw on academic research, memoir, and film as we discuss cases in Nepal, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Kashmir. Throughout the class we will focus on both femininities and masculinities and locate our analysis of South Asia within global discourses of gender and sexuality.
Labors of Love
Lewis & Clark College, Portland, Oregon. Fall 2022
This course focuses on types of labor that are typically associated with love, sex, passion, and care and the imperative to “do what you love”. We will analyse various labors of love including sex work, care work, creative work, craft occupations, intellectual work, and athletic work across different contexts. In doing so, we will investigate how and when work becomes associated with pleasure and how and when it becomes a source of frustration. We will also critically examine various contemporary discourses of “the great resignation” and “bs jobs”. Throughout the course we will pay particular attention to how dynamics related to gender, class, sexuality, race, and colonialism shape our experiences of work. Together we will answer these questions: What does it mean to love our work? Should we love our jobs? Who gets to love their jobs? What are the consequences of loving our work?
For Love or Money? Global Markets for Intimate Labor
Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, The New School, New York. Fall 2019
Markets for intimate labor such as care work, reproductive labor, sex work, and domestic work are shaped by gendered, racialized, and classed transnational flows. This course examines how the commodification of such types of labor that are traditionally associated with love, care, and/or the private realm of the home occurs unevenly across the world. Together we will inquire, can the economic be separated from the “ or are these two spheres often entangled? What are the implications of this entanglement for different groups? The first part of the course introduces students to conceptual frameworks that help us understand commodification, global labor markets, and gendered and racialized forms of intimate labor. The second part draws on ethnographic studies of intimate labor to understand the local specificities of this phenomenon and the transnational exchanges of such labor. The last part of the course is a critical evaluation of the “do what you love” discourse in relation to labors of love such as paid and unpaid creative, emotional, and academic labor. In a rapidly transforming landscape of work, we will evaluate the historical and contemporary ways in which love, work, and money are often intertwined in our global landscape. In doing so, we will discuss the political and social implications of this spatially uneven commodification of intimate labor.
Social Theory
Habib University, Karachi. Spring 2019
This course introduces students to foundational concepts and theories in the social sciences. Starting with Enlightenment thinking and the emergence of positivism and empiricism, this course tackles this major transition in the way social order is conceptualized and theorized. Students will be exposed to key social theorists, including Marx, Weber, Durkheim as well as some of their legacies. Students will also be introduced to contemporary social thinkers such as Gramsci, Fanon, Said, Spivak, Foucault, Bourdieu, Derrida, Goffman, Butler, among others. In doing so, the course aims to introduce the students to the major paradigms of structuralism and post structuralism. Students will tackle different levels of analysis, understand structural forces and societal dynamics, and debate the role of agency in social interaction. Students will gain familiarity with grand theories and their critiques, as well as the conditions that impelled the post-structural turn in social sciences.
(Co-taught with Aaron Mulvany and Severine Minot)