I have created courses on development, urbanization, and the environment, adopting a format that emphasizes collaborative work, role playing, intensive discussion, debate, and dialogue. These include “Development and Its Alternatives,” “Urban Society,” and “Sociology and the Environment.” My new courses will expand into questions of infrastructure and climate adaptation.

---

New Courses

The Built World, upper division undergraduate course (Winter 2018)

This course will explore the unanticipated challenges of shaping and maintaining infrastructure in the context of rapid environmental change. Paying special attention to the lives of infrastructure, students will investigate the frictions of social and political conflict, privatization, and environmental degradation in the construction of everyday life. Topics will include historical and contemporary examples from across the world, highlighting future possibilities.

 

Bending the Curve, lower division undergraduate course (Spring 2018)

Designed as part of the University of California’s Bending the Curve (BTC) effort, the fundamental vision behind this course is to build on the Carbon Neutrality initiative of the UC system, and to identify lessons from these living laboratories. The course will be taught as a multi-campus undergraduate hybrid course, or “flipped classroom,” in which interactive video lectures taught by faculty from across the UC campuses are accompanied by in class discussion and collaborative group projects.

---

Sample Student PechaKucha Program from “Urban Society”