TEACHING @ FLORIDA GULF COAST UNIVERSITY

ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS

This course focuses on the intersection of ethics and politics in the era of the climate crisis. In addition to examining classic debates in environmental ethics, students explore the boundary between individual ethics and collective/structural social responsibility. Navigate the complex boundaries between ethics and politics, the course also examines the epistemology of climate denial.

PHILOSOPHIES OF LIBERATION

This course focuses on both classic and contemporary debates about freedom and liberation. The course traverses early modern political philosophy (esp. social contract theory), the basis of justice claims opposing slavery, exploitation, and alienation, and finally contemporary theories of oppression (including feminist interventions). Students explore distinct conceptions of liberty and a range of approaches to human liberation.

BIOETHICS & SOCIETY

This upper division course focuses on the relation between classic questions in contemporary bioethics (e.g., consent, access, autonomy) and central debates in the history of political philosophy (e.g., individual rights, state theory). Students engage bioethics from a critical vantage, with a special emphasis on applied ethics for students bound for the medical field.

PHILOSOPHY OF DECOLONIZATION

This upper division course examines central texts in the anticolonial tradition of the 20th century across Latin American, the Caribbean, and the African continent. Students explore the philosophical foundations of claims to and discourse around decolonization in relation to strategies of colonialism, neocolonialism, the international division of labor, and a globally integrated capitalism.

TOPICS IN
PHILOSOPHY OF LAW

This course focuses on the social and political dimensions of the practice of international law in a globalized world, a world fraught by inequality. Focusing on relations between former colonial powers and postcolonial states, the course explores these themes through three approaches to international legal theory: the liberal, Marxist (esp. dependency theory), and Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL).

Advanced debates in feminist theory

This upper division course examines debates within feminist political theory, examined through the ‘big three’ approaches: liberal, Marxist, and radical feminism(s). Students critically examine feminist appraisals of classic debates in political theory as well as explore distinct methods and strategies of gender liberation.

HISTORY OF IDEAS

. The course consists of primary texts in the history of European philosophy from Descartes to Kant and Hegel to Critical Theory. It narrativizes the history of philosophy along two indices: idealism versus materialism and, pertaining to the task of philosophy, critique versus contemplation. It aims to introduce students to fundamental methodological questions in the history of philosophy.

Teaching @ the University of Oregon

PHIL 170: Love & Sex (2021)

In this introductory level course, students consider three major debates in feminist theory and the study of gender and sexuality: the commodification of sexuality and sexual freedom, the classic feminist ‘sex wars’, and contemporary debates about the status of gendered labor. The course is designed with a distinctively critical bent, focusing on interrogating prohibitions, manipulations, and distortions of sexual desire and the exploitative dimensions of sex/sexuality in a society shaped by gender inequality.

PHIL 309: Global Justice (2021)

This upper-division course draws students into a debate about justice from a global perspective, historically fraught by the colonialism and imperialism. Students explore whether globalization itself is just or unjust in itself (and whether this question is itself the right one) and, of course, what we mean by ‘globalization’ (what, precisely, has been ‘globalized’). The course covers anticolonial / postcolonial / decolonial thought, and dependency/world-systems theory.

PHIL 110: Human Nature (2020)

This course focuses on the figure of human nature in the history of social and political philosophy and critical theory. Students explore how distinct political theories have constructed or presupposed a specific philosophical anthropology— what human nature does at a social and political level and how it functions in grounding or displacing various political claims, with attention to social problems such as the climate change, the production of gender norms, and the historical justification of colonialism.