Sample Courses/Reading Lists
My pedagogy centers around two primary goals: 1) cultivate a classroom space where students learn to think critically about and apply course concepts and 2) encourage students to grapple with these concepts light of race, gender, class, and sexuality.
At The Ohio State University I teach graduate and undergraduate classes in both the Department of English and Center for Ethnic Studies. I have also taught a number of Communication Studies courses across introductory and upper-level undergraduate levels at previous institutions. Below you can find course descriptions and sample reading lists. Please feel free to draw on the material here if it is helpful to you in your own classroom.
Seminar in Rhetoric: Exclusion, Inclusion, and the Rhetoric of Racial Justice
This seminar grapples with racialized and gendered discourses of repression and co-option. On the one hand, scholars have explored the rhetorical dimensions of overt racial exclusion and containment, white nationalism, and the repression of anti-racist and feminist movements. Others examine pernicious discourses that utilize the language of inclusion to expand oppression, such as postracialism, liberal multiculturalism, homonationalism, queer liberalism, and carceral feminism. Focusing on the post-WW2 era to the present, this seminar asks what tools anti-racist, feminist, and rhetorical scholarship offers to identify and unpack these discourses, as well as how we might carve out more expansive, creative, or coalition-based notions of justice. Students will read works by scholars in writing, rhetoric, and literacy studies, gender and sexuality studies, Black and ethnic studies, and other related fields, while developing their own lines of scholarly inquiry in relation to these topics.
Sample Reading List
Ono and Sloop, “The Critique of Vernacular Discourse”
Flores, “The Imperative of Racial Rhetorical Criticism”
Vega & Chávez, “Latinx Rhetoric and Intersectionality in Racial Rhetorical Criticism”
Endres, “The Rhetoric of Nuclear Colonialism”
Masri, “Rhetorical Bordering as Transnational Settler Colonial Project”
Flores, Deportable and Disposable
Kelly, “Donald J. Trump and the Rhetoric of Ressentiment”
Ore, “Twenty-first Century Discourses of American Lynching”
Nautiyal, “Anaerobic Rhetoric”
Mukherjee, “A Pre-History of Post-Race”
Watts, Postracial Fantasies and Zombies
Melamed, Represent and Destroy
Rodríguez, White Reconstruction
Ahmed, “The Nonperformativity of Antiracism”
Khúc, dear elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss
Ferguson, The Reorder of Things
Puar, Terrorist Assemblages
Eng, The Feeling of Kinship (Introduction + Chapter 1)
Hesford, Violent Exceptions
Maraj, “Unlike Conventional Form(s) of: Beyond Reactive Antiracism”
Spade, “Solidarity Not Charity”
Athanasopoulos, Black Iconoclasm
Hoang, Writing Against Racial Injury
Sturken, “Designing the Memory of Terror, Negotiating National Memory”
Cheng, “How to Survive: AIDs and It’s Afterlives in Popular Media”
Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts”
Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?
Alexander, “TERF Logics are Carceral Logics”
Hsu, “(Trans)forming #MeToo”
INCITE!-Critical Resistance, “Statement on Gender Violence and the Prison Industrial Complex”
Introduction to Asian American Studies (Undergrad)
This course introduces students to foundational topics and approaches in Asian American studies. Students will discuss the roots of “Asian America” as a panethnic category formed through collective activism, as well as key concepts such as the “model minority” and “forever foreigner” stereotypes. The course will consider a range of topics relating to Asian Americans history and politics, including, but not limited to: the Asian American movement, exclusionary immigration laws, contemporary Asian American politics (e.g. anti-Asian racism and Asian American activism amidst COVID-19), and representations of Asian Americans in popular media. In doing so, students will reflect on how Asian American experiences intersect with issues of gender/sexuality, cross-racial solidarity, transnational belonging, and labor exploitation. Students will thus learn to think critically about Asian American studies through an interdisciplinary, panethnic, and comparative framework, while also honing their skills in researching and writing about issues affecting Asian American communities.
Sample Reading List
Lee, “The Chinese Exclusion Example”
Izumi, “Alienable Citizenship”
Ono and Pham, selected reading from Asian Americans and the Media
Wu, selected reading from The Color of Success
Shanmugaraj, “Disidentifying from the ‘Model Minority’”
Lee, “Politics and Activism in Asian America in the 1960s and 1970s” from A New History of Asian America
Fujino, “Political Asian America”
Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement”
Yamada, “Invisibility is an Unnatural Disaster”
De Jesús, “Fictions of Assimilation: Nancy Drew, Cultural Imperialism, and the Filipina/American Experience”
Kuo, “#FeministAntibodies: Asian American Media in a Time of Coronavirus”
Idzik, “Saving Asian orphans”
Espiritu, “Toward a Critical Refugee Study: The Vietnamese Refugee Subject in US Scholarship”
Vang & Myers, “In the Wake of George Floyd: Hmong Americans’ Refusal to be a U.S. Ally”
Saranillio, selected reading from Asian Settler Colonialism
Hall, “Which of These Things is Not Like the Other”
Litam, excerpt from Patterns that Remain
Asian American Media & Popular Culture (Grad + Undergrad Mix)
This course (5,000-level course open to both grad and undergrad students) considers the relationship between media, popular culture, and various Asian American communities in the United States. Students will engage interdisciplinary, pan-ethnic perspectives on how media depictions of Asian Americans interlace with questions of power, agency, oppression, and social change; how cultural discourses impact Asian American identity-formation and meaning-making; and how Asian American communities engage and produce media in ways that challenge existing hierarchies and renarrate their experiences. We will examine representations of Asian Americans in mainstream film, television, and popular news media as well as how Asian Americans produce grassroots media to challenge official narratives or formulate collective identities. In doing so, this class will attend to the ways that Asian American media and popular culture are impacted by social formations such as race, gender, class, and citizenship.
Sample Reading List
Ono & Pham, selected reading from Asian Americans and the Media
Davé, selected reading from Indian Accents
Selected reading from East Main Street: Asian American Popular Culture
Rodríguez, “The ‘Asian’ Exception and the Scramble for Legibility”
Oh & Min, selected reading from Navigating White News
Kim, selected reading from Settler Garrison
Lowe, selected reading from Intimacies of the Four Continents
Hall, “Which of these things is not like the other”
Vang and Myers, “In the Wake of George Floyd: Hmong Americans’ Refusal to Be a US Ally”
Eguchi, selected reading from Asians Loving Asians
Ishizuka, selected reading from Serve the People
McKee, “Rewriting History: Adoptee Documentaries as a Site of Truth-Telling”
Gopinath, selected reading from Impossible Desires
Khúc, selected reading from dear elia
Arts of Persuasion (Undergrad)
This introductory undergraduate course introduces students to rhetoric as an “art of persuasion.” Rhetoric is a primary means by which identity, participation, and agency is expressed in public discourse. It engages the questions: how does rhetoric enable us to express our interests, formulate identity, shape social reality, right wrongs, urge fairness, enact justice, and elicit compassion? How might we develop a critical lens for interpreting and engaging public texts and arguments, as well as how they interact with issues of justice, citizenship, and public decision-making? Students will learn about foundational and contemporary concepts in rhetorical theory, including the elements of persuasion, audience and rhetorical effects, genres and situations, forms and structures, argumentation schemes, narrative, visual rhetoric, tropes and metaphors, and cultural and ideological frameworks. They will develop their skills in both constructing persuasive arguments as well as critically examining what factors make texts persuasive, how rhetoric constructs social reality and political subjects, and how rhetoric interacts with issues of truth, justice, and equality. As a result, this course asks students to reflect on how public discourses work, the impacts they have, and how they are used. This course is part of the OSU core under the GE Theme: Citizenship for a Just and Diverse World.
Sample Reading List
Hallsby, selected chapters from Reading Rhetorical Theory
James, “Teaching Theory, Talking Community” in Seeking the Beloved Community: A Feminist Race Reader
Palczewski et al, selected chapters from Rhetoric in Civic Life
Hall, “Encoding/Decoding”
Zarefsky, “Strategic Maneuvering in Political Argumentation”
Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex”
Gómez, “The Truth About What Happened Here”
Moran, “Racial Technological Bias and the White, Feminine Voice of AI VAs”
Noble, selected reading from Algorithms of Oppression
Jackson, “Reimagining Intersectional Democracy”
Critical/Cultural Communication (Undergrad)
This upper-level undergraduate course introduces and deepens student knowledge of critical/cultural communication studies by considering how critical theories such as those emanating from postcolonial theory, feminist theory, Marxism, the Frankfurt School, critical race and ethnic studies, and/or queer theory interact with communication processes. Students will learn to think critically about how media, culture, and social systems interact as dynamic sites of meaning-making. Centering student-driven critical discussion of how communication influences and is influenced by systems of power, students will walk away with an introduction to critical/cultural communication, its intellectual development/historical influences, and its contemporary applications. Students will further develop their understanding of their specific interests within critical/cultural communication by pursuing independent and collaborate research, writing, presentations, and activities. They will be able to articulate and apply critical/cultural communication theories to analyze contemporary and historical events and artifacts to understand, critique, and/or challenge unequal power relations.
Sample Reading List
Roopali Mukherjee, “Of Experts and Tokens: Mapping a Critical Race Archeology of Communication”
Excerpts from Marx and Gramsci in Media and Cultural Studies
Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, “The Culture Industry”
Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding”
Patricia Hill Collins, “It’s All in the Family”
Chandra Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes”
David Oh, selected reading from Whitewashing the Movies
Charles Athanasopoulos, “Is This Your King? An Iconoclastic Reading of Black Panther”
Kent Ono & John Sloop, “The Critique of Vernacular Discourse”
Lisa Flores, selected reading from Deportable and Disposable
Jasbir Puar, selected reading from Terrorist Assemblages
David Eng, selected reading from The Feeling of Kinship
Sara Ahmed, “The Nonperformativity of Antiracism”
D-L Stewart, “Language of Appeasement”
Louis M. Maraj, “What's in a Game? Wake Working (Fantasy) Football's Anti-Black Temporalities”
Alexis McGee, “The Language of Lemonade”
Jackie Wang, selected reading from Carceral Capitalism
Allison Page and Jacquelyn Arcy, “#MeToo and the Politics of Collective Healing: Emotional Connection as Contestation”
Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, selected reading from The New York Young Lords
V. Jo Hsu, selected reading from Constellating Home
Intersectional Communication (Undergrad)
This upper-level undergraduate class centers around communication as it relates to intersectionality. Together, we will learn about and explore the history of intersectionality, its roots in Black feminism, as well as its contemporary applications/debates. Students will read about and discuss academic and popular debates about intersectionality’s nuances, history, relationship to communication, potential shortcomings, and more. We will discuss how intersectionality applies to our own lives and as well as contemporary issues both inside and outside of academia, centering critical discussion about how communicative processes interact with multiple systems of privilege and power. Students will develop a working knowledge of key referential texts on intersectionality, its historical development, as well as its relationship to communication. Students will be able to articulate how intersectionality relates and/or applies to contemporary social issues, how it shapes one’s social location/identity, and how it can determine differential access to societal resources and privileges. Students will also be able to articulate how power and communication are intimately entangled, the implications intersectionality has for thinking about ethical communication, and how communication strategies might be useful in naming, challenging, and unseating unequal power relations.
Sample Reading List
Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex”
Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement”
Alicia Garza, “A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement by Alicia Garza”
Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference”
Selected Readings from This Bridge Called My Back
Barbara Smith, “A Press of our Own Kitchen Table”
Nirmala Erevelles and Andrea Minear, “Untangling Race and Disability in Discourses of Intersectionality”
Karrieann Soto Vega and Karma Chávez, “Latinx Rhetoric and Intersectionality in Racial Rhetorical Criticism”
Jose Muñoz, selected reading from Disidentifications
Maile Arvin, Eve Tuck, and Angie Morrill, “Decolonizing Feminism”
Safiya Noble, selected reading from Algorithms of Oppression
Sarah Jackson, “(Re)imagining Intersectional Democracy from Black Feminism to Hashtag Activism”
Shinsuke Eguchi and Keisuke Kimura, “Racialized Im/possibilities: Intersectional Queer-of-Color Critique”
“A Response to Hate Crime Charges from Red Canary Song + Survived & Punished”
“75+ Asian and LGBTQ Organizations’ Statement in Opposition to Law Enforcement-Based Hate Crime Legislation”
“Critical Resistance-Incite! Statement on Gender Violence and the Prison Industrial Complex”
Shui-Yin Sharon Yam, “Uneasy Recognition and Proximity” in Inconvenient Strangers
Jasbir Puar, “I Would Rather be a Cyborg than a Goddess”
Jennifer Nash, selected reading from Black Feminism Reimagined
Louis M. Maraj, “’All My Life I Had to Fight’: Shaping #BlackLivesMatter through Literacy Events” in Black or Right: Anti/Racist Campus Rhetorics
Paulo Friere, selected reading from Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Student-selected readings (based on student interests, varies by semester/class)