Courses
Courses designed and taught at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
SHS3: Social and Health Systems, "Performing Medicine”
(13 student seminar, UNC-CH School of Medicine) — Performing Medicine: Embodied Ethics, Witness in Action, Department of Social Medicine. Seminar members explore what it means to embody ethical commitments to autonomy, non-maleficence, beneficence, and justice, which require mutual discernment with patients and colleagues. We will learn alongside artists, clinicians, and social movements; reflecting and reimagining medical ethics through narrative and poetry performance, staged and forum theater, movement/dance, multimedia art and public rituals/installations. We will pay special attention to creative mobilizations of clinical authority and multi-genre artistic pursuits for health justice, as these forms of witnessing with / for others amidst suffering and renewal can enhance physicians’ professional commitments and better resource design of care for others / self.
COMM 318 Cultural Diversity (Cultural Difference)
(26 students) -- A focus on cultural difference through dialogue-centered study of -isms and -phobias, and key approaches to understanding race, gender, sexuality, health status and ability, ethnicity and nation, religious difference, and economic class. Students' research projects, presented to a public audience, profile and propose specific cultural interventions to shift the ways "cultural diversity" can be used to keep status quo inequalities in place, or as an excuse to enact violence.
AAAD 290 Performing Water Politics in the Local/Global Black Diaspora
(20 students, service learning course) -- A focus on ethnography, interview techniques, and service-learning with community members in Rogers Rd. neighborhood who experience environmental racism, zoning inequalities, and water contaminated by municipal waste in Chapel Hill, NC. Students' resulting performance production for the University-hosted Global Africana conference (with interviewees and global water scholars in audience) was devised from original research in NC and study of water rights performances and activism in Ghana, South Africa, and Afro-Columbia. (Co-taught with Professor Joseph Megel).
COMM 262 Performance Ethnography (Performance and Culture)
(10-20 student seminar, 2x) -- A focus on ethnography and interview techniques alongside performance practices focused on peacebuilding/conflict transformation initiatives, and on community-led pursuits of health and justice in global and local contexts. Students' interview projects have included various "peoples' assemblies" at the NC Legislature, and final pubic performances have included interviewees in the audience, and have been hosted by the Jackson Center for Making and Saving History.
COMM 260 Performance and Social Change
(18-22 student seminar, 3x) -- A focus on everyday and extraordinary performance as it responds to, creates, and envisions social change. "Profiles in courage" of global and local practitioners and researchers doing performance and social change work, with final research projects presented as live performance interventions in and around UNC campus and town of Chapel Hill (streets/sidewalks, bank and hospital lobbies, cafeterias, historic monuments). Organizing themes for the course have included Desmond Tutu's body of work in dismantling apartheid, and a tour of U.S. arts and social change projects in "A Beginner's Guide to Community-Based Arts".
Communication + Scholarship (MURAP Mellon Foundation)
(16 student summer seminar), Mellon Foundation, Moore Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program, hosted at UNC Chapel Hill’s Sonja Hanes Stone Center for Black History and Culture; Cultivating interactive presentations for student research projects in regional scholarship forum, presentation and communication methods preparing for doctoral scholarship.
COMM 160 Introduction to Performance
(Large lecture course, 90 students, co-supervising 3 TAs with faculty; and 18-22 student seminars, 5x) -- A focus on performance in its social, cultural, and political contexts; with the opportunity to develop performance projects based on adaptation of literature, oral history performance, and exploration of social roles and critical theory (e.g. engaging race, gender, education and citizenship). Anthologies used include: "Resisting Arrest: poems to stretch the sky"--poems by writers of color responding to U.S. police violence; "When Bullets Begin to Flower"--liberation and anti-imperialism poetry from Mozambique and Angola; "Hafiz" 14th century Sufi Islamic poetry on principles and practices of mysticism, equanimity, and curiosity.
