Teaching
Through my teaching and advising, I encourage students to develop patterns of living and thinking drawn from the environmental humanities. I understand the environmental humanities as coming into existence through the everyday labors, actions, and activism of concerned people, as a critical field interconnected with the rhythms of daily life. Subsequently, I believe that the practices, orientations, and ideas coalescing within the environmental humanities offer insights that can inspire more attentive ways of being.
This “pedagogy for the everyday environmental humanities” is composed of four pillars. The first teaches students to position their lives in relation to more-than-human beings. The second pillar urges students to attend to questions of equity and justice as they examine historical and contemporary issues. The third asks students to recognize and value multiple environmentalisms, especially those obscured by dominant and popular modes of environmental action. Finally, the remaining pillar calls on students to develop their own counternarratives and ways of being that challenge injustice.
Central to this pedagogical approach is an emphasis on experiential and community-based learning. I believe that students should have the opportunity to study and shape issues happening in their communities.
Courses Taught as Instructor of Record
Princeton University
People and Pets (FRS 189)
If you were to visit ten households anywhere in the United States today, you would be greeted by a pet — most likely a dog or cat, but also perhaps a bird, hamster, rabbit, fish, turtle, or another creature altogether — in seven of those homes. And, if you asked, there’s a good chance that nearly all the human inhabitants of those households had, at one point in their lives, cared for a nonhuman animal and perhaps even viewed this creature as part of their family. While recognizable kinds of petkeeping and beliefs regarding these creatures have coalesced across the United States and much of the world, the very idea of what constitutes a “pet,” the roles they perform, the activities required to care for them, and the cultural values they produce have changed over time. “People and Pets” asks how relationships among pets and humans have developed over the past two centuries in the U.S., parts of Europe, and around the world.
Reading across humanities and social science disciplines, we will consider the unexpected connections that link pets to specific articulations of gender, race, sexuality, class, ability, and species. Arranged topically and historically, the seminar considers issues ranging from the classed and gendered development of dog and cat breeds in Victorian England to the racial politics of modern dog rescue and dogfighting to the global expansion of consumerism and the creation of a multi-billion-dollar pet industry. In taking up these issues and many others, we will study nonhuman companions not as passive receptacles of human culture, but rather as beings with agency who have co-shaped and co-determined their places in our lives. Such a view compels us to ask how petkeeping cultures arise through human-nonhuman relationships and to consider how multispecies relations produce cultural forms and artifacts. Some questions that guide our inquiries include: How have definitions of, and attitudes toward, pets changed over time and across space? How have pets simultaneously upheld and resisted dominant social structures? And how does the interdisciplinary study of pets across cultures support efforts to conceptualize and build more just worlds for humans and nonhumans alike? To address these questions, we’ll take up a wide range of primary materials from creative nonfiction to film, archival objects, advertisements, and children’s books. In addition to regular class meetings and discussions, activities will include a trip to the AKC Museum of the Dog and Cotsen Children’s Library, along with visits from invited speakers.
University of Oregon
Introduction to Environmental Literature (ENG 230)
This course serves as an introduction to environmental literature, focusing on narratives written about — and sometimes even with — nonhuman species. We will consider how animals, plants, and fungi operate not only as characters that come alive on the page, but also as lively interlocuters through whom stories emerge and take shape. In doing so, we will ask how fiction, nonfiction, comics, poetry, and film might prompt us to understand ourselves as interconnected with diverse nonhuman lives. How can literature teach us to act in ways that produce more just futures for humans and nonhumans alike? And how might contemporary narratives rekindle relationships with nonhumans that are severely threatened during a time of mass extinction, climate catastrophe, and growing social inequity? Students from all majors and identities are welcome.
Multispecies Justice (ENVS 411)
Since its disciplinary founding in the 1980s, environmental justice has become a central framework for environmental studies research. By targeting inequities that arise from the uneven distribution of benefits and risks, the irregular recognition of harm, and the unequal participation of various communities, environmental justice has redefined “the environment” and advocated for the well-being of individuals regardless of their social positions. Drawing upon this work, “multispecies justice” seeks to identify and eliminate injustices that also reach across species boundaries. Only now coalescing as a formal area of study, multispecies justice argues that the pursuit of justice for human communities — particularly for the most vulnerable and disempowered — requires the eradication of inequities that harm other species. Unlike animal rights approaches that force animals into becoming quasi-citizens of human communities and ecological analyses that chart potential disruptions to biotic communities, multispecies justice insists that more just worlds can only be achieved by supporting the mutual well-being of humans and nonhumans alike. In doing so, the field engages interdisciplinary problem solving.
This course explores the possibilities of multispecies justice, identifies how the concept builds upon and diverges from various articulations of environmental justice, and practices decision making through an integrated community project. The class will address a number of key questions, including: How do inequities created by specific groups of people harm other human and species communities? How can improving the lives of humans and nonhuman species together establish more resilient futures? And which constituents should be responsible for studying, implementing, and overseeing justice-based practices? Once we have achieved an understanding of multispecies justice through the relevant literature, our attention will turn in the second half of the class to study the issue of houselessness. By speaking with local groups involved and volunteering at a community housing site, we will develop a research report that considers the needs of multiple human and nonhuman individuals. These reports will be shared with one another and possibly with community partners at the end of the term.
Environmental Ethics (ENVS 345)
We’ll consider the ethical obligations that various groups of people have toward ensuring the well-being of other species. Over the course of the term, we’ll discuss the historical and contemporary debates that characterize the field of environmental ethics, the major debates of the animal rights movement, feminist critiques of animal rights and rational ethics, the emerging area of thought known as multispecies ethics, and the approaches taken by groups who continue to be marginalized in environmental ethics. Refusing to distance ourselves from challenges such as species extinction, climate change, and interspecies inequity, we’ll discuss and practice ways to use environmental ethics for the benefit of people and species alike. All students from all backgrounds and interests are welcome in this course. As we will see, diverse thoughts and approaches are needed to strengthen and shape environmental studies.
Introduction to Environmental Studies: Humanities (ENVS 203)
In this class we’ll examine how the humanities contributes to environmental studies and to our understanding of the environment. We’ll begin with the emergence of modern U.S. environmentalism and trace how literary, cultural, and artistic responses to pollution shaped environmental activism and thought. Drawing from this early awareness of toxicity, we’ll then examine the rise of environmental justice and study recent resistance movements from humanities perspectives. Finally, we’ll look at new attempts to include other species within justice frameworks, examining recent efforts within the humanities to resist extinction and settler colonialism.
All students from all backgrounds and interests are welcome in this course. The material covered in this class is not comprehensive, but rather provides an introduction to some of the topics most important to environmental thought and practice at the University of Oregon and to the field of environmental studies, more broadly. If you would like to know more about how, for example, Latinx or Asian American and Pacific Islander communities have resisted environmental harms, I’m happy to recommend additional resources and materials.
Multispecies Studies and the Anthropocene (ENVS 411)
Life during the anthropocene presents a number of challenges for humankind and other species. Perhaps the greatest challenge during this unsettling moment of anthropogenic change is learning to live with others who are also suffering from climate change, extinction, urbanization, pollution, and industrial activity. Unable to adapt fast enough to the profound environmental changes of the past few centuries, many species are threatened and going extinct. At the same time, domesticated and non-native organisms have been flourishing in the wake of human activity. As these examples indicate, the anthropocene — perhaps more than any other moment during humanity’s brief history — reveals the various ways that humans are tethered to the lives of nonhumans. If humankind hopes to survive this difficult moment, we must learn to live together with fellow plants, animals, fungi, and even microbes. With its interest in how a multitude of creatures are connected to human lives and cultures, the emerging interdisciplinary field of multispecies studies offers a promising way to explore, and act upon, human relationships with the beings and things of the world.
This class charts the development of multispecies studies and considers how the various modes of togetherness posed by the field can help us all survive and resist anthropogenic disruption caused by the beneficiaries of colonialism and capitalism. To do this work, we will examine four broad themes taken up by multispecies studies and adjacent fields: the animal, the plant, the material, and the human. These four subjects offer points of departure for exploring the configurations that currently characterize the field. We will think about how animals, plants, and material things impact people, and we will complicate the category of “the human.” The ideas gathered from the readings and class discussions will inform a final project that explores an animal, plant, or material that impacts your life in some substantial way.
Written Reasoning: Sustainability (WR 121)
Written Reasoning: Ecology of Place (WR 122)
Written Reasoning: Food Justice (WR 122