Teaching Interests
Anthropology, Visual Studies, African Diaspora, Caribbean, Performance, Filmmaking, Borders, Black Feminist Anthropology, Decolonial Anthropology, Ethnographic Film, Autoethnography
Autoethnography as Feminist Method
Autoethnography is a feminist method that centralizes personal experience and locates it within systems of power. Moving against the positivist and objectivist tenets of Anthropology as a social science, autoethnography sought to embrace the humanities and foreground the subjective and personal not as opinion but as valid sources of knowledge from which to theorize. This course will explore autoethnography theoretically and methodologically as a feminist praxis in anthropology and beyond. Students will read texts that employ autoethnographic method, write critical autoethnography, and learn how to create experimental autoethnographic films. People with or without film production experience are encouraged to take this course.
In this course, we will explore films made by Black women, non-binary, and gender non-conforming directors throughout the African diaspora. From the Caribbean to Africa, North and South America, this class will engage with films as a critical text while also exploring themes of spirituality, racial identity, queerness, racism, and resistance among others. Students will have a weekly film screening and seminar discussion. This course is designed for students with an interest in film, African diaspora studies, & gender studies. Each week will consist of a film screening and discussion of readings. The course readings will emphasize film aesthetics through the analysis of form and style (e.g. cinematography, editing), and its relation to content.
This advanced-level course examines the intersections of Black Feminist, African Diaspora, and Border studies to explore the particular way that borders, borderlands, and geographies are navigated throughout the African diaspora. We will explore how Black people throughout the Americas, the Caribbean, Europe, and Africa create transnational geographies of belonging, traverse borders imposed upon them, and reimagine the world in new ways. In this course, we will explore central questions around migration, incarceration, ritual, spirituality, performance, geography, food, and identity. Students will have the opportunity to engage in these topics while also applying the themes of the course through writing and creative assignments.
Visualizing Border/Lands
Within the last 20 years over 70 border walls have been built around the world in the name of sovereignty and global security. The increase in border walls has also introduced laws that have sought to decrease people’s mobility and movement and create ideas of us vs them. In this class we will explore how borders are built, navigated, and contested. This not only includes national borders, but also individual, linguistic, racial, and gendered borders and the spaces that exist between them. Using text, film, photography, and sound, this course will explore how borders are represented and reimagined throughout the world. This course includes 3 creative projects that ask students to visualize the borders in their own lives. Class featured on Haverford’s “Cool Classes”
Feminist Filmmaking Studio
This is an intermediate film production course designed for students with an interest in film, intersectional and decolonial methods, video production, and ethnographic film. Despite the lack of recognition of woman-identified directors in Hollywood and independent cinema women and gender non-conforming filmmakers have long been hard at work. Through course films, readings, and video production, we will explore the various means through which feminist filmmakers subvert the embodied male gaze, a particular perspective which has been made to seem universal. Students will have the chance to reflect upon and enact the practice of feminist filmmaking (fiction, non-fiction, hybrid, experimental, video art, music video, etc) through the production of a short 5-10 min film
(Re)Performing the Caribbean: Identity, History, and Nation
Performance, music, and dance have long been important spaces for communities of the Black Diaspora. This course takes performance (broadly defined) as its field of inquiry in an effort to unpack the reasons why music, dance, and other realms of performance have been significant spaces for Black-Diasporic and Caribbean descendant communities. Using a variety of mediums from text, film, photos, poetry, literature and oral history this course explores the way people of the Caribbean and their diasporas construct ideas and realities of the nation, identity, and history not only within the geopolitical Caribbean but also surrounding areas with similar histories (In South America, North America, Central America) and areas with significant Caribbean populations (e.g London, New York, Boston etc.).