TEACHING

My teaching program focuses on the history of surveillance and information technologies, state governance, and national identity. I also teach courses on technology and culture, tech ethics, and the history and social dimensions of the life sciences. Drawing upon my own transnational and historical research, my curricula emphasize histories of science, technology, and expert knowledge in global context. As an instructor, I seek to impart conceptual and analytical tools students can use to better understand – and one day intervene in – the ways science and society shape one another.

STS Reading Lab: State
Tufts University, STS Program, Fall 2022

How do states govern? What do science and technology have to do with it? This course examines relationships between science, technology, and the state in global and historical context. It delves into the ways states use computers, surveillance, medical innovations, and other projects to govern populations. It looks closely at these projects’ societal impacts, and how they influence the state itself – materially, organizationally, and ideologically. The course also examines how forms of governance influence scientific pursuits, and how political and technological change shape each other. Readings cover states in the Global North and South, and colonial and post-colonial, and socialist and post-socialist, democratic, and authoritarian contexts. The course considers big questions like, “What is the state?” and delves into topics including biometrics, nuclear power, experts, and biomedicine, and their relationships to national belonging, ideology, empire, and citizenship.

Technology in the Surveillance Society
Tufts University, STS Program, Spring 2023

Surveillance technologies are increasingly becoming a part of everyday life. This course provides a historical and contemporary overview of surveillance and its social, political, and ethical implications in global context. Organized topically along different forms and applications of surveillance, the course presents surveillance as not only a set of recent technologies limited to the Information Age, but as a set of socio-technical techniques of seeing and being seen, categorization and control, and quantification and measurement that have persisted across a long historical and transnational trajectory. Drawing upon global STS scholarship, and works in the history of science and technology, surveillance studies, and related fields, the course dives into the relationships between surveillance and national politics, economy, policing, borders, colonialism, race, class, immigration, and societal exclusion and inclusion.

STS Reading Lab: Life
Tufts University, sts program, Spring 2023

What is life? This STS Reading Lab examines the historical, political, and social dimensions of the life sciences, medicine, and biology in global context. Readings cover critical history of science and STS perspectives on the ways humans have used science and technology to study, define, and govern life itself – whether in laboratories, botanical gardens, medical schools, colonial expeditions, or courts of law. The course pursues an expansive understanding of life that includes human individual and collective life, as well as non-human animals, plants, and life on planets other than earth. It also considers different modalities and scales at which life has been examined in biology and society in the past and present - from the molecular and cellular level in laboratories to cultural notions of personhood, the body, and belonging. The course also delves into topics including the biotech industry, public health, genetics, and eugenics, and their relationships to politics, race, gender, empire, and the state.