Teaching

In addition to introductory anthropology courses and courses on South Asia, I teach courses on medical anthropology and law. In these, I foreground the deep yet under-explored relationships between medical anthropology and law. Two new courses I have designed and am currently teaching (in Winter 2023-24) are “The Capitalist Lives of Pharmaceuticals”, which examines how the calculi of Big Pharma condition pharmaceutical access; and “Medical Anthropology and Law: Bodies, Properties, Rights”, which trains a feminist legal lens upon the fraught ethical terrains of abortion, genetics, clinical trials, and opioid addiction.

I teach across genre, with film and case law constituting a significant portion of my syllabi. I believe that genres considered the territory of a particular discipline ought to be demystified and engaged across disciplines. For example, as I read case law with my students, we collectively challenge the perception that students need training in law to understand court decisions. Assigning case law in anthropology courses is also one of the ways I concretize my goal of interdisciplinarity in teaching. I am invested in research collaborations across law and anthropology, and am an inaugural member of the ‘Intellectual Property, Technology & Justice Research Group’ at UBC’s Allard Law School.

Regardless of specific course content, my pedagogy centers on highlighting entrenched colonial hierarchies within and beyond academia. In the classroom, we unpack how colonialism is a structure, not an event; what it means for decolonization to not be a metaphor (Tuck & Yang, 2021); and how settler colonialism scaffolds and pervades the milieus within which we live, teach, and study. This approach sometimes leads to uncomfortable classroom conversations. We acknowledge the discomfort and potentially destabilizing implications of what we are studying—my goal is to highlight that discomfort can be productive, and an anthropology classroom, of all places, should often be an uncomfortable and fraught space.

Beyond the classroom, I welcome opportunities to mentor students considering law school or interdisciplinary careers, pursuing non-traditional academic trajectories such as returning to school after a hiatus, or grappling with the burdens of student parenting.