Teaching

In Harvard’s Department of Sociology, I teach courses on poverty in the US, housing and homelessness, urban community, social ties, and qualitative research methods. These represent a mix of original courses and courses adapted from prior departmental offerings. Below are descriptions for two of the courses I developed for the undergraduate sociology curriculum:

• “Housing and Homelessness.” This course centers the sociological study of housing and homelessness. It is guided by several core questions: What is sociological about housing, and why should the study of housing be central to the discipline of sociology? What have sociologists written about the long-term and day-to-day experiences of housing insecurity and homelessness? And how does housing inequality intersect with other dimensions of inequality? Through a combination of historical and contemporary readings, students gain an understanding of the factors contributing to housing challenges, including a shrinking supply of affordable housing, inadequate wages and employment, discriminatory housing practices, and urban development. Students also learn about how supply-side actors reproduce or exacerbate housing inequality, and why policy responses do or do not seem to help.

• “Community in Urban Context.” The notion of ‘community’ has long been central to the sociological study of cities and life within them. This course familiarizes students with what sociologists have written about the contours of urban community: what defines it, how it forms and persists, the functions it serves, and when it backfires. Through a mix of foundational and contemporary texts, the course considers a number of the substantive issues that have historically shaped—and threatened—urban community, from social control to gentrification and city planning. During the semester, students receive training in the use of several methods for studying urban life and conduct original research to answer questions of their choice about urban community (or an urban community). 

In graduate school, I served as a teaching fellow for undergraduate- and graduate-level courses on topics like poverty, philanthropy and the nonprofit sector, qualitative methods, and sociological theory, and I co-led the teaching practicum for first-time teaching fellows in sociology.