When I teach, I refuse to separate social theory from more empirically grounded material. Certainly, my contemporary theory courses involve an overwhelming emphasis on theory. And conversely, my political, urban, and global sociology classes focus on subject matter relevant to those titles. But I am intransigent about one point: theory is that which allows us to ask questions about the social world. This means that I always have students think theory in relation to that social world – their social world. In theory courses, this entails moving from high levels of abstraction to the level of our actual experience and back again. In my other classes, this means using theory to ask critical questions about existing bodies of literature. And of course, I always emphasize the critical. In my classes, we leave our assumptions at the door, and through sustained discussions, exchanges, and dialogue, we work together to build common understandings that build upon, yet transcend, what we thought we already knew.
At FIU, I teach:
SYO 6536: Racial Capitalism (Spring 2024)
SYA 6018: Sociological Theory (Fall 2024)
SYP 5447: Settler Colonialism in Comparative Perspective (Fall 2025)
SYA 4010: Classical Social Theory: An Introduction (Spring 2024) (Fall 2024) (Spring 2025) (Fall 2025)
SYG 2000: Introduction to Sociology (Fall 2023)
At UNCG, I taught the following courses:
SOC 617: Ethnography in Theory and Practice (Spring 2022)
SOC 614: Contemporary Social Theory, 1867-2019 (Fall 2019)
SOC 490: Contemporary Theories of Power (Fall 2018) (Spring 2020) (Fall 2020)
SOC 490: Is There a Racial Capitalism? (Spring 2021) (Fall 2021)
SOC 344: Global Populisms since 2008 (Fall 2018) (Spring 2020)
SOC 333: On States and Smashing Them (Spring 2019)
SOC 333: Readings in Contemporary Political Sociology (Spring 2022)
SOC 330: Space and Power in the City (Spring 2019) (Spring 2022)
SOC 290: Classical Social Theory: An Introduction (Fall 2019) (Fall 2020)
For ghosts of courses past, here are some currently dormant syllabi: