Teaching
My teaching is mostly based within the Cultural Studies undergraduate major and the Masters of Cultural Studies (MCS) at the University of Sydney. Below are details on the main units that I run most years. In addition, I often teach graduate student workshops at Sydney and other universities around the world.
Natures and Cultures of Bodies (GCST5902) – MCS
From conception and birth to the disposal of the dead, human bodies are relationally composed (and decomposed). Our bodies are profoundly shaped by interactions with other humans, with a variety of social, cultural, and technological systems, and with a host of other species. This unit explores a range of conceptual approaches to bodies/embodiment, giving students new tools for cultural analysis. It engages with diverse empirical sites: from reproductive technologies to shifting approaches to taking care of the dead; from technologically augmented bodies to uploaded intelligences; from interventions in the human microbiome to the inequitable distribution of the toxins we carry within us.
Animal/Human Cultures (GCST2603) – Undergraduate
This unit explores diverse sites of human/animal encounter: from the factory farm to the laboratory, from our intimate relations with pets to efforts to eradicate undesirable ‘pests’. It interrogates changing ideas in the sciences, popular culture, and cultural theory about animal life – their intelligence, sociality, reproduction, and more – as well as our relationships with animals and our ethical obligations to them. At stake here is not only how we treat other species, but also how our own human lives and possibilities – including our understandings of race, gender, and more – are shaped by shifting notions of ‘the animal’.
Nature, Culture, Power (GCST3638) – Undergraduate (now primarily taught by Blanche Verlie)
Understanding our place in a changing environment is a 21st century priority. This unit uses feminist, decolonising, and multispecies, frameworks to investigate how environmental problems are shaped by intersecting factors of gender, race, sexuality, ability, economic status, and colonialisms. Drawing on examples such as climate change, toxic contamination, resource extraction, and biodiversity loss, this unit examines the material and conceptual links between human and non-human natures, and cultural, political, economic and social forces.