BARNARD

My office hours for Spring 2024 are 2-4pm Thursdays in Milstein 1115 or via Zoom. If you would like to book a time slot in advance, please do so here.

At Barnard, I currently teach the following courses:

Feminist Political Thought (Lecture)

Feminism is often recognized as a political movement. But is there a feminist way of thinking about politics? This course investigates the core premises, provocations, proposals, and tensions of feminism as they relate to specifically political problems, focusing on Anglophone feminist political thought in the late twentieth century. Who is the subject of feminist politics? What is the meaning of “difference,” and how can—or should—feminists seek to organize across it? What are appropriate topics for politics, and what should remain private? Is the family a space for politics? The household? The body? How much of the personal can, and should, be made political? Are there feminist ways of doing politics? How should feminists engage with various political institutions like the state? We will consider these questions with reference to texts from both feminist activists and feminist scholars. 

Capitalism & its Critics (Colloquium)

Capitalism is usually thought of as an economic system: what does it have to do with politics? This course examines how thinkers of contrasting perspectives have understood capitalism politically. Some have celebrated the market as an escape from coercion, while others criticize it as a source of disguised domination; some see capitalism as leveling social hierarchies, while others point to its creation of class and racial hierarchy; some see capitalism as an engine of wealth creation and heightened living standards, while others emphasize its destruction of existing ways of life and production of inequality; some see capitalism as an engine of peace, while others emphasize its reliance on violence. In particular, we will consider the relationship between state and market, moral critiques of markets and exchange, analyses of the role of force and violence in accumulation, and theories of freedom and domination.

The Politics of Nature (Colloquium)

Nature and politics have often been counterposed in political thought: politics is understood to be a distinctly human activity, perhaps even the defining human activity, while nature describes the material world as it operates independently from human action. Politics concerns the realm of decisions about how things will and ought to be, while nature names that which simply is and cannot be changed. What, then, does it mean to think about the politics of nature? We begin by examining the ways that political thinkers have understood the meaning of nature in general before moving into specifically ecological thought and ending with reflections on the central challenge of nature and politics today: climate change. Themes addressed include the role of science in politics, the challenges of politics on a global or planetary scale, the political and moral status of nonhuman nature, and the treatment of nature in economic thought.

BROOKLYN INSTITUTE FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH

As an associate faculty member at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research I taught the following courses:

Ecofeminism and Xenofeminism (Fall 2018)
Introduction to Feminist Theory (Spring 2019)
Social Reproduction Theory (Spring 2019)