As a Teaching Assistant and Associate at UCLA, I have been fortunate to teach nearly 250 students from diverse backgrounds. As a social science instructor, my ultimate objective is to produce academically rigorous individuals and global citizens who are knowledgeable and empathetic toward humans and nonhumans.
As a three-time teaching assistant for the course “Anthropology 3: Culture and Society,” my discussion sections focused on issues and concepts such as ethnocentrism and cultural relativism and invited students to develop an ethnographic eye to look at and reflect upon their everyday lives and surroundings. I have used various pedagogical methods and tools to engage students in active learning, such as group discussions (using breakout rooms on Zoom during online sessions), and anonymous quizzes (using online tools such as Mentimeter), and have received excellent student reviews.
COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
Culture & Society (ANTH 3, Fall 2020; Fall 2021; and Winter 2021)
This course is a general introduction to sociocultural anthropology that explores the meanings, roles, and politics of culture in today’s world, and how societies are organized and transformed. It covers key anthropological concepts, theories, and methods through a comparative perspective, examining similarities and differences among societies and cultures worldwide. The course also includes an introduction to the theories and methods of sociocultural anthropology. It provides students with the opportunity to conduct ethnographic research and write an ethnographic paper, encouraging critical thinking and a deeper understanding of social organization, socioeconomic systems, and cultural change.
Anthropology of Food (ANTH 133, Spring 2021)
This course looks at the production, consumption, and distribution of food, with a particular emphasis on the culture of food. It uses food as a means to look at a range of topics: ecological history, class, poverty, hunger, ethnicity, nationalism, capitalism, gender, race, and sexuality. It emphasizes that food is at once the most obvious and least explored window into the shaping of identities, desires, and needs in the contemporary world.
Study of Social Systems (ANTH 140, Winter 2022)
This course offers a focused introduction to sociocultural anthropology by examining the individual/person as a cultural category and its cross-cultural variations in social practices; alternatively, we may call it an introduction to the anthropology of the individual. It investigates the different ways of constructing the cultural category of individual/person/self in different societies; it also explores important aspects of personhood from a cross-cultural comparative perspective, such as gender roles, morality and spirituality, rights and responsibilities, privacy and boundaries of the individual, consumption, and materiality in self-identity, marginality and stigma, and the global diffusion of the modern Western individualism and its impacts on local notions of personhood. The class concludes with a brief discussion on the latest changes to the cultural category of the individual/person/self in the digital age.