I joined The New School in the fall of 2007 with a joint appointment in the Department of Politics at The New School for Social Research and the Graduate Program in International Affairs at The New School for General Studies. My formal training is in political science, but I try to be omnivorous in my reading and teaching. One of the exciting things about being a part of the GPIA is the opportunity to have colleagues in anthropology, sociology, economics, and comparative literature.
My research and teaching interests include comparative politics, the politics of Southeast Asia, spatial and visual politics, the sociology of domination and resistance, the political economy of dirty and dangerous work, and interpretive and ethnographic research methods. I am currently working on a book project that draws on participant-observation research on the kill floor of an industrialized cattle slaughterhouse located in the Great Plains of the United States to explore how massive processes of everyday violence are quarantined, rationalized, and reproduced through divisions of labor and space. I am also in the nascent stages of a research project on social movements, protest politics, and political identities in Thailand. My curriculum vitae has more information about my research, writing, and speaking activities.
Recently, I've taught the core GPIA MA Global Flows seminar and a summer course on Power that included MA and PhD students from NSSR and GPIA. I am also developing graduate level courses on Resistance, on Political Ethnography, as well as for the core Department of Politics MA Seminar. Before coming to the New School, I taught an interdisciplinary undegraduate seminar at Yale University on Dirty and Dangerous Work. I encourage a high level of active participation from my students: examples of assignments in my Global Flows seminar include reading Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities as social theory, hunting down the hidden abode of production of various commodities by tracing their spatial, labor, and life-cycle trajectories, and semester-long oral history and/or participant-observation projects that offer students the opportunity to put theoretical frameworks into conversation with New York City. To learn more about my teaching, click on the above seminar links for my syllabi or see this Global Flow's seminar evaluation and this MA thesis, both written by former students (the latter was awarded GPIA's 2008 Outstanding Thesis Award).
Fall 2008 Office Hours:
Wednesdays, 10 - 11:30 a.m. and by appointment.
Please sign up on the sheet outside Room 722 of 6 E. 16th St.
