“In response to the objection that a position in favor of nonviolence is simply unrealistic, this argument requires a critique of what counts as reality, and it affirms the power and necessity of counter-realism in times like these. Perhaps nonviolence requires a certain leave-taking from reality as it is currently constituted, laying open the possibilities that belong to a newer political imaginary.”

Judith Butler, The Force of Nonviolence

My teaching is also informed by my research, my personal commitment to principles of nonviolence and the philosophy of peace education. I organize my classes through some of its key concepts: egalitarian inclusion, critical engagement and the exploration of alternate, even utopian narratives. As a comparatist I use the methodology of making texts legible through its contexts and in contrast with multivalent perspectives; and I also present this as an ethical position.

This summer (2021) I will be teaching a course in alliance with the Metta Center of Nonviolence. This course, Alternate Cosmologies: Nonviolence, Feminism and (self) Transformation, will explore the intersections between critical feminist thinking and the framework of nonviolence, especially through the call for alternate cosmologies, narratives and imaginaries. In order to shift away from systems that function through violence, the course will look at the common ground of systemic violences, in this case of patriarchy, racism and colonialism/imperialism. The course will point out how power, understood as a form of domination, undergirds systemic violence and how it is resisted and reconceptualized through the frameworks of both feminism and nonviolence. And we will look at alternate ways in which power is understood, as well as alternate forms of community, inter-relationships and politics, both historical and utopian, that women especially have produced or imagined. Without essentializing the marker, “woman,” the questions we will explore in this course—through reading theoretical and literary works, as well as myths, music and films—is whether women’s calls for alternate cosmologies is based on a different relationship with the self, with others, and the world, and what difference such an understanding makes? How does that understanding affect the markers of “masculinity” and gender more broadly and, why is it important that “men” also understand these logics? Why is it necessary that alternate, often marginalized, cosmologies should now be foregrounded and the mechanisms of its marginalization understood? How are these mechanisms of marginalization interconnected with systemic racism? Finally, we will also explore pragmatic ways in which change can be instigated, or is already underway, through research projects where students will connect the theoretical frameworks, historical contexts and alternate imaginaries with contemporary nonviolent resistance movements and/or their own activism, work and aspirations.

For more information about this course, or future courses, please subscribe to my email list on the home page or for further details about syllabus and enrolling here.

At the University of California, Los Angeles I taught the undergraduate seminar, The New Story: Literatures of Nonviolence, Resistance and Anarchy. This course engaged students with the framework of nonviolence beyond its history of civil disobedience. In addition to classical texts by Thoreau, Tolstoy and Gandhi, we read Butler, Barbara Demings and Mukulika Banerjee, watched talks on the moral behavior of animals and documentaries about community gardening and food as a form of resistance, alongside with novels, such as Amitav Ghosh’s, The Hungry Tide, that not only foregrounds climate change (in the Bengal Sunderbans), the violence intrinsic to the nation-state but also depicts the formation (and destruction) of historical utopian communities. Pivotally, the requisite final research project allowed students to independently connect contemporary nonviolent praxis with the theoretical frameworks and historical examples analyzed in class. As a few students informed me, this timely topic stimulated very personal, perspectival shifts.