Sample Courses/Reading Lists
My pedagogy centers around two primary goals: 1) cultivate a classroom space where students learn to think critically about and apply course concepts to new contexts and 2) relate these course concepts to and situate the classroom within larger systems of racial and gendered power.
At Gonzaga University I teach classes in Communication Studies classes across introductory and upper-level undergraduate levels. During my time teaching at the University of Pittsburgh I also taught introductory courses on Argument and Public Speaking. I have also developed proposed syllabi for classes I have not (yet) taught. I am including course descriptions and reading lists here, courses that are proposed are indicated in the title. Please feel free to draw on the material here if it is helpful to you in your own classroom. If you would like a full copy of a syllabus, I am happy to share via email!
Critical/Cultural Communication
This course introduces and deepens student knowledge of critical/cultural communication studies by considering how critical theories such as those emanating from postcolonial theory, feminist theory, Marxism, the Frankfurt School, critical race and ethnic studies, and/or queer theory interact with communication processes. Students will learn to think critically about how media, culture, and social systems interact as dynamic sites of meaning-making. Centering student-driven critical discussion of how communication influences and is influenced by systems of power, students will walk away with an introduction to critical/cultural communication, its intellectual development/historical influences, and its contemporary applications. Students will further develop their understanding of their specific interests within critical/cultural communication by pursuing independent and collaborate research, writing, presentations, and activities. They will be able to articulate and apply critical/cultural communication theories to analyze contemporary and historical events and artifacts to understand, critique, and/or challenge unequal power relations.
Sample Reading List
Roopali Mukherjee, “Of Experts and Tokens: Mapping a Critical Race Archeology of Communication”
Excerpts from Marx and Gramsci in Media and Cultural Studies
Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, “The Culture Industry”
Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding”
Patricia Hill Collins, “It’s All in the Family”
Chandra Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes”
David Oh, selected reading from Whitewashing the Movies
Charles Athanasopoulos, “Is This Your King? An Iconoclastic Reading of Black Panther”
Kent Ono & John Sloop, “The Critique of Vernacular Discourse”
Lisa Flores, selected reading from Deportable and Disposable
Jasbir Puar, selected reading from Terrorist Assemblages
David Eng, selected reading from The Feeling of Kinship
Sara Ahmed, “The Nonperformativity of Antiracism”
D-L Stewart, “Language of Appeasement”
Louis M. Maraj, “What's in a Game? Wake Working (Fantasy) Football's Anti-Black Temporalities”
Alexis McGee, “The Language of Lemonade”
Jackie Wang, selected reading from Carceral Capitalism
Allison Page and Jacquelyn Arcy, “#MeToo and the Politics of Collective Healing: Emotional Connection as Contestation”
Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, selected reading from The New York Young Lords
V. Jo Hsu, selected reading from Constellating Home
Intersectional Communication
This class centers around communication as it relates to intersectionality. Together, we will learn about and explore the history of intersectionality, its roots in Black feminism, as well as its contemporary applications/debates. Students will read about and discuss academic and popular debates about intersectionality’s nuances, history, relationship to communication, potential shortcomings, and more. We will discuss how intersectionality applies to our own lives and as well as contemporary issues both inside and outside of academia, centering critical discussion about how communicative processes interact with multiple systems of privilege and power. Students will develop a working knowledge of key referential texts on intersectionality, its historical development, as well as its relationship to communication. Students will be able to articulate how intersectionality relates and/or applies to contemporary social issues, how it shapes one’s social location/identity, and how it can determine differential access to societal resources and privileges. Students will also be able to articulate how power and communication are intimately entangled, the implications intersectionality has for thinking about ethical communication, and how communication strategies might be useful in naming, challenging, and unseating unequal power relations.
Sample Reading List
Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex”
Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement”
Alicia Garza, “A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement by Alicia Garza”
Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference”
Selected Readings from This Bridge Called My Back
Barbara Smith, “A Press of our Own Kitchen Table”
Nirmala Erevelles and Andrea Minear, “Untangling Race and Disability in Discourses of Intersectionality”
Karrieann Soto Vega and Karma Chávez, “Latinx Rhetoric and Intersectionality in Racial Rhetorical Criticism”
Jose Muñoz, selected reading from Disidentifications
Maile Arvin, Eve Tuck, and Angie Morrill, “Decolonizing Feminism”
Safiya Noble, selected reading from Algorithms of Oppression
Sarah Jackson, “(Re)imagining Intersectional Democracy from Black Feminism to Hashtag Activism”
Shinsuke Eguchi and Keisuke Kimura, “Racialized Im/possibilities: Intersectional Queer-of-Color Critique”
“A Response to Hate Crime Charges from Red Canary Song + Survived & Punished”
“75+ Asian and LGBTQ Organizations’ Statement in Opposition to Law Enforcement-Based Hate Crime Legislation”
“Critical Resistance-Incite! Statement on Gender Violence and the Prison Industrial Complex”
Shui-Yin Sharon Yam, “Uneasy Recognition and Proximity” in Inconvenient Strangers
Jasbir Puar, “I Would Rather be a Cyborg than a Goddess”
Jennifer Nash, selected reading from Black Feminism Reimagined
Louis M. Maraj, “’All My Life I Had to Fight’: Shaping #BlackLivesMatter through Literacy Events” in Black or Right: Anti/Racist Campus Rhetorics
Paulo Friere, selected reading from Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Student-selected readings (based on student interests, varies by semester/class)
Argument: Exploring Diversity & Social Difference
This is an introductory undergraduate course in Argument. The course is designed to develop students’ skills and knowledge about the theory and practice of argumentation. The course is themed around the topic of diversity and social difference. The theme is designed to provide a real-world topic/examples through which students to learn and apply the argument concepts and skills they learn in the classroom. At the same time, they will develop a basic vocabulary for thinking about how communication is impacted by systems of power such as race and gender.
Sample Reading List
Lloyd Bitzer, “The Rhetorical Situation”
David Zarefsky, “Strategic Maneuvering in Political Argumentation”
Paula Chakravartty et al, “#CommunicationSoWhite”
D-L Stewart, “Language of Appeasement”
Charles Athanasopoulos, “Iconography in the Age of Black Lives Matter”
Beagle, “Challenging the Opposition” in Introduction to Debate
Sara Ahmed, “Commitment as a Non-Performative” in On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life
Combahee River Collective, “The Combahee River Collective Statement”
Alicia Garza, “A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement”
Louis M. Maraj, “The Politics of Belonging…When ‘Becoming a Victim of Any Crime is No One’s Fault’” in Black or Right: Anti/Racist Campus Rhetorics
Asian Americans & the U.S. Prison Regime (Proposed)
Though Asian Americans are not always included in conversations about contemporary issues of prisons, policing, and the criminal justice system, both historic and contemporary events have demonstrated the way in which Asian American communities are intertwined with carcerality. From Japanese American internment during World War II to contemporary calls for more policing to protect Asian Americans from hate crimes in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Asian Americans have a part to play in how we understand interweaving histories of incarceration, race, and activism. This course considers these connections through an interdisciplinary lens that asks students to consider how Asian Americans relate to the criminal justice system across different issues and temporalities. They will explore a range of topics including the detention and deportation of Southeast Asian Americans, Japanese American internment, the ongoing battle over affirmative action, Asian Americans, and the school to prison pipeline, and more. At the same time, though the course focuses centrally on Asian Americans, students will critically consider how Asian American politics intersects comparatively with systems of anti-Blackness, gender, and colonialism. Students will walk away with a basic level of fluency in issues affecting Asian Americans, theoretical concepts such as the “model minority”, comparative racialization, and the politics of coalition. Students will also hone their skills in researching and writing about the intersections between Asian American communities and the criminal justice system.
Sample Reading List
Kandice Chuh, selected reading from Imagine Otherwise
Dylan Rodríguez, “Asian-American Studies in the Age of the Prison Industrial Complex”
Oh and Umemoto, “Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders: From Incarceration to Re-Entry”
Herzig-Yoshinaga, “Words Can Lie or Clarify: Terminology of the World War II Incarceration of Japanese Americans”
Pistol, “Asian American responses to Donald Trump’s anti-Asian rhetoric and misuse of the history of Japanese American incarceration”
Wu, selected reading from The Color of Success
Puar and Rai, “The Remaking of a Model Minority”
Buenevista, “Model (undocumented) minorities and “illegal” immigrants: centering Asian Americans and US carcerality in undocumented student discourse”
Pha, “Two Hate Notes: Deportations, COVID-19, and Xenophobia against Hmong Americans in the Midwest”
Connie Wun, “Schools as Sites of Antiblack Violence: Black Girls and Policing in the Afterlife of Slavery” in Antiblackness
Cheng, “Chapter One: Borders and Embroidery” in Ornamentalism
Cho, “Converging Stereotypes in Racialized Sexual Harassment: Where the Model Minority meets Suzie Wong”
Kuar, “Ungovernable and Inviolable: Acts of Resistance in and against Immigrant Detention”
Kochiyama, “Supporting Political Prisoners” in Passing it On
Red Canary Song and Survived & Punished, “A Response to Hate Crime Charges from Red Canary Song + Survived & Punished”
Sexton, “Proprieties of Coalition: Blacks, Asians, and the Politics of Policing”
Liu and Shange, “Toward Thick Solidarity: Theorizing Empathy in Social Justice Movements”
Wang, “Against Innocence: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Safety” in Carceral Capitalism