Teaching
My teaching reflects a strong commitment to race, gender, and sexuality scholarship in the context of Latin American literary, historical, and cultural studies. I regard my field of research as a venue for the continuous democratization of the word as a source of empowerment and political intervention in the social field. Inspired by queer and critical race scholarship, my predominant goal in the classroom is to make students aware that everything that is presented in the sources that we analyze as coded, fixed, stable, and natural is covering up the exercise of concrete forms of power that emerge and take shape in specific socio-historical contexts.
I think of my teaching role as a facilitator of questions in processes of reciprocal learning and scholarly conversations with students to critique the ways that dominant discourses reach consensus in societies across time and space. I had the privilege to teach a diversity of courses, ranging from introductory classes on Latin American culture to graduate seminars in queer history, critical race theory, and Nineteenth-Century Studies.
In my seminars, I design a safe space where students engage in a critical relationship to textual materials that speak in multiple ways to diverse student populations shaped by different personal and educational experiences. Essential to my lesson plans is the inclusion of exercises that question and disassemble the power dynamics invested in multiple kinds of sources, including novels, plays, poems, medical studies, epidemic chronicles, manifestos, and laws. Students examine how these documents’ plots, characterizations, ideological assumptions, and political motivations seek legitimacy for social orders, regimes of knowledge about the body, and imperial and nationalist impulses.
My predominant goal as a queer researcher and teacher is to make sure that my students are exposed to a variety of ways that one can be a scholar. My students are part of a program of study that includes sources written by members of a diverse social spectrum that goes beyond the Eurocentric-Western canon of white cismen. I structure my syllabi, writing assignments, in-class group seminars, lectures, and student symposia thinking of encouraging not only mastery of a particular topic but also transformational learning based on intellectual dynamism. I give my students a range of assignment choices to let them identify and explore their own interests as I am aware that a diverse classroom will develop different sets of academic skills. My pedagogical approach seeks to contribute to a cross-cultural exposure in which, by working together, students learn about their colleagues’ own expertise in the social sciences and humanities.
Learning in ways that are meaningful sparks creativity and innovation. I regard the classroom as a space of paramount importance to create a laboratory of ideas and a milieu for collective learning and the expansion of knowledge.