As an Asian American scholar and an educator, I am committed to creating space within higher education for students from historically underrepresented groups while advancing marginalized knowledges on racism, gender inequality, and other forms of social inequity. Students at both Harvard and the University of Texas at Austin have expressed the importance of developing sociological skills to understand their lives and histories of their families, their communities, and themselves. For some students, feeling “seen” happens through reading books about Asian American refugees, for others, it is through engaging with art about Latinx undocumented youth and the DREAM movement, while others feel most “visible” when discussing queer POC social media practices in the classroom.

Concrete and yet complicated, stories are how I open up my students to different levels of critical thinking. By focusing on rich ethnographic and qualitative material, I train my students to navigate the details, nuances, and even contradictions of individual biographies amidst structural inequalities. This work, moreover, is urgent both because of the demographic changes at our universities and the politics of the world around us.

To check out some of my students’ past projects visit my teaching website, Teaching Asian America.

collaborative learning

and public education

course descriptions

Sociology of Asian America

Today, over 22 million people living in the United States identify as Asian. Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) are one of the fastest growing populations in the US. What are the social, cultural, and political structures that shape the lives of AAPI? How have the experiences of AAPI communities changed from the nineteenth century to the present? This course takes a sociological view to examine “Asian America.” Rather than analyzing AAPI as a monolithic group, this course explores the diversity of experiences and histories within Asian America. Reading across a range of case studies, we will examine Asian America through important historical and social phenomena such as colonialism, environmental racism, war, migration, and social movements. We will look at the ways that AAPI individuals and communities have been socially and politically constructed as a racial group and the ways that such categorizations continue to shift. Finally, we will collaborate to analyze primary qualitative data on AAPI experiences of and responses to racism and economic instability related to the COVID-19 pandemic. We will synthesize our findings into storyboards that will then be used to create educational videos about anti-Asian racism specifically as well as disasters and inequality more broadly.

Environment and Inequality

How does your zip code affect your health? What are the social and political consequences to building a dam? How do natural disasters exacerbate racial inequalities? This seminar explores environmental issues through the lens of inequality, focusing particularly on race, indigeneity, gender, and (dis)ability. We will borrow from case studies across the globe: from toxic disasters in Bhopal, India, to the Grenfell Tower fire in London, UK, to Standing Rock, in the United States. While learning about the transnational and comparative-historical scope of environmental issues, students will apply key theoretical tools to situate course topics within broader themes, including cultural memory, popular culture, violence, and governmentality. Students will also develop a research paper on a course-related topic of their choice, receiving guidance on developing a proposal, determining appropriate research methods, and synthesizing findings with themes discussed in class.

Ethnography of Social Movements Sociology (Junior-level Methods Tutorial)

From the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to the Civil Rights Movement, to Twitter, the world has recently witnessed a wide range of social, political, and cultural transformations. How do social movements factor into these changes? What can we do as sociologists to understand and document the work of activists and social movements? This tutorial explores the craft of ethnography through the theme of social movements. We will examine key ethnographies of social movements, using these as models for understanding ethnographic fieldwork and analysis. As a junior tutorial, your research interests will serve as a foundation for the class. You will each complete an independent research project on some aspect of social movements, employing in-depth interviews and/or ethnographic methods. Through in-class workshops, we will formulate research questions and practical research design. The goal of this course is to provide you with the opportunity to conduct original research and to better understand the insights and challenges of ethnographic fieldwork.

The course will begin with a review of some of the key debates on social movements within sociology. Students will then design and complete their own ethnographic research projects, engaging with the key methodological questions raised throughout the course. Each student will choose a group on campus or in the Cambridge/Boston area, formulate research questions, and conduct participant observations and interviews. The course will cover the various steps of the research process, from identifying and developing a research question through collecting and analyzing data and reviewing existing literature, to constructing the final paper. The course will also discuss the logistics of conducting ethnographic fieldwork, including contacting groups, gaining access, and recording data.

Sociology of Science, Technology, and the Body

Why have ancestry tests become popular in the twenty-first century and what do they tell us about the relationships between race and capitalism? How has contemporary knowledge about cancer and radiation relied upon systems of colonialism and racism? What processes lead to revered organizations such as NASA to adopt risky and unsafe practices? This seminar uses a sociological approach to understanding science and technology. The course focuses on social, cultural, and political dimensions of knowledge production, scientific and medical practices, and the body. While examining the roots of sociological science and technology studies (STS) in the US, we will consider the transnational dimensions of contemporary science and technology issues and how they continue to evolve within a complicated and highly connected global economy. The class will address key questions about power along lines of race and ethnicity, nation, gender, sexuality, class, and ability that underlie structures of science and technology, as well as how science and technology shape the very meanings of these terms. We will study cases including transnational surrogacy, Black activism around sickle-cell anemia, and the biopolitics of medical triage in West Africa, among others. Students will also develop a research paper on a course-related topic of their choice, receiving guidance on developing a proposal, determining appropriate research methods, and synthesizing finding with themes discussed in class.