TEACHING STATEMENT

​As an educator, I believe the classroom is a space for social and political transformation. Every aspect of my teaching and mentoring practice is informed by the conviction that the classroom is one of the most important places I can make an impact as a critical-cultural and media studies scholar. This conviction is connected to my research agenda, which takes seriously forms of culture and cultural production that are often dismissed as benign, inconsequential, or merely commercial to understand how they are central to broader struggles over power. In my role as a teacher, my goal is to facilitate critical thinking about often taken-for-granted media and technologies to prepare students to be more informed and engaged citizens, community members, and consumers and producers. To that end, I seek to foster horizontal learning environments where my students are co-creators of knowledge and feel empowered to take ownership of their learning process; to provide them with tools and theories that give them new ways to describe, analyze, and critique their everyday realities and encounters with media and technology and deconstruct power in its many forms; and to encourage them to apply these perspectives to their own lives even after their time in my classroom ends. My pedagogical approach necessarily includes not only teaching students about how power operates in the world around them, but also finding ways to mitigate its uneven impacts in my own classroom environment. This pedagogical approach requires finding ways to support students who are structurally disadvantaged within the university, particularly first-generation students and students from marginalized backgrounds, by implementing pedagogical strategies that reduce barriers to access and participation, often to the benefit of all students.