Teaching Philosophy Statement

Historical changes are occurring in education right now, and it is exciting for me to be active at Pitzer in the midst of such a moment of transition. The traditional disciplines and area studies fields are in crisis, as are such fundamental assumptions as objectivity, progress, liberal humanism and pluralism, universalism, and other values of the 18th century European Enlightenment. These fields and concepts have been challenged for their historical role in the production of what Michel Foucault has been termed a "regime of truth" which supports fundamentally unequal power relations both in the U.S. and globally. In response to the far-reaching questioning of these concepts and institutional formations, new interdisciplinary and even anti-disciplinary fields are emerging at the center of the debates. These fields include border studies, cultural studies, diaspora studies, postcolonial studies, discourse studies, gender studies and men’s studies, queer theory and gay and lesbian studies, the critical study of whiteness, and women of color theory, in addition to the already well-established fields of women's studies and the different branches of ethnic studies. With the end of the Cold War and increasing globalization, these processes of deepening crisis and debate over new conceptual paradigms can only increase in prominence and in their effect on colleges and universities. I am very much a part of these developments as they take shape here at Pitzer College in my classroom work as well as in my research, committee, and community work.

One of my objectives at Pitzer is to work with students in confronting the contradictions between what we say we do in the U.S. and what the effects of our actions are historically, in contemporary society, and in the future. For example, while we are trained to see ourselves as "progressing" gradually towards a more equal society, U.S. and global history shows us that economic, cultural, and social
relations remain unequal and even violently destructive in many ways. My challenge as a teacher is to help students uncover and document such contradictions and problems in order to discover and work to implement achievable short- and long-term solutions.  Withoutacknowledging such difficult and entrenched problems and our own complicity in them, we cannot address them. I work with students to live out new social relations and develop solutions by learning how to recognize the ways in which differences between more powerful and less powerful groups are produced, whether based on race, gender, culture, nationality, sexual orientation, socio-economic class, religion, or other factors. This often becomes a process of finding ways in which our own position in society may privilege us in various ways, and yet are also a loss of linkage and solidarity with peoples we may assume are distant or different from us, what Gayatri Spivak has called the "unlearning of our privilege as our loss." Then we can work together to find ways to critique and reconfigure these differences and produce a new sense of committed community both at Pitzer and beyond.

The primary way in which my courses contribute to this process is through readings, experiences, and discussions of cultural differences as they interact with other modes of racial, gender, nationality, sexual orientation, and class positioning. My own specialization is in East Asian culture and eligion and its representations in the Euro-America, and I often explore dimensions of difference in my teaching and research. Through teaching these and related traditions (see course listings below) I work to achieve Pitzer's distinctive educational objectives of promoting intercultural and interdisciplinary understanding as they lead to social responsibility. These objectives are what first brought me to teach at Pitzer, and they continue to be the primary reasons why I continue working here. In doing so I do not restrict my intercultural and interdisciplinary work to the campus, but instead strive to become what has been called a "public intellectual," an academic who works to build linkages of the college with the local, national, and global communities and the sites where they overlap. My primary location at Pitzer is in the field group (or department) known as International and Intercultural Studies, but I also teach courses in Asian Studies, Asian American Studies, Gender and Feminist Studies and the Five College Women's Studies Program, Media Studies, and Religious Studies.