• Borders and Boundaries: (Interdisciplinary Triple-I Course for First Year Students, with Jennifer Gates-Foster from Classics/Archaeology and Nadia Yaqub from the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies): This course addresses borders and boundaries through case studies anchored in the ancient and modern Middle East. We will consider ancient theories of borders and the body, the materiality of borders, and the role of borders in cultural formation and identity. We will juxtapose this study of the ancient world with a critical examination of the cultural and political meaning of borders today. We will pay particular attention to the role of borders and boundaries in producing difference in both contexts. Throughout the course our study of specific historical and political cases will be supplemented with analysis of imaginative works (literature, films, and art) that arise directly out of bordering practices and their effects. As we study this material, we will be addressing the question “What can imaginative and representative works do to enforce, process, mitigate or undermine bordering practices?” This interdisciplinary framework will encourage students to consider borders from different scalar perspectives: at the level of the theoretical construct as well as the lived experiences of specific communities and individuals both in the past and in the present.

• Geographic Thought (required course for all graduate students in geography): This course begins from a recognition that how we narrate the history of geography matters for how we understand what geography is, who geographers are, and where we locate geography. Our approach to the history of geographic thought questions what is included in the canon, why, and with what implications. We trace the lines of inquiry that have led to shifts in geographic knowledge historically and identify and engage recent debates within geography. We study the development of geographic approaches to each selected topic and key concept (such as space, place, scale, and territory), emphasizing feminist, antiracist, decolonial, and Indigenous perspectives and methodologies. Students build a common base for understanding the diversity within the discipline of geography and develop analytical tools to further question and push forward geographic knowledge. (Fall 2018, Fall 2019, Fall 2020)

In addition, I teach courses in three main areas:

Feminist Geography:

• Feminist Geographies I & II (Graduate Seminar): Since the first publications about women's absence in geography as researchers and research subjects appeared in the early 1970s, there has been a significant body of work on feminist and gender geographies. Feminist Geographies I traces the development of this increasingly diverse subfield towards transnational, intersectional, antiracist, and decolonial perspectives and in its epistemological, methodological, and pedagogical interventions and practices. Feminist Geographies II engages advanced readings on difference and power, exploring how feminist thinkers approach social difference in a way that does not fix and essentialize it and reduce difference to biology, the possibilities for understanding difference as embodied and emergent in emplaced encounters, and the ethical and political obligations and registers of emergent difference for research and praxis.

• Gender, Space, and Politics in the Middle East: This course questions how the representations of the Middle East are gendered and analyzes icons as the “veiled women” and “terrorist men” and the political projects they serve. We investigate the ways in which colonialism, as well as anti-colonial nationalist and Islamist movements, has created (or attempted to create) new kinds of feminine and masculine identities and spaces. We discuss the wave of popular uprisings across the region through the lens of gender and trace the gendered effects of war and displacement.

• Feminist Geographies (a new introductory level undergraduate course): This course explores how spaces matter for the production of gendered and racialized inequalities, as well as for feminist mobilization for social justice. We build on anti-racist feminist approaches to thinking geographically about gender in relation to race, class, religion, and sexuality. Starting with an analysis of bodies as sites of difference, power, and politics, readings, research projects, and class activities trace feminist geographies of the UNC-CH campus, spatial organization of neighborhoods, cities, and workplaces, and regional and cross-regional connections of transnationalism and globalization.

• Cultural Geography

Globalization and Transnationalism:

• Transnational Muslims: This course examines the geographical production of Muslim subjects through transnational flows, networks, and imaginaries. When I teach this course as part of Duke Middle East in Europe Summer Program based in Berlin, the focus of this course is on the modes and spaces of citizenship, belonging, and identity for Muslim populations in Germany, how they produce their own spaces in Berlin, and the everyday practices and spaces of living together in neighborhoods like Kreuzberg.

• Global Issues

• Neoliberalism and Subjectivity (Graduate Seminar)

• People and Places: Geographies of Globalization

• Global Studies Honors Seminar

Middle East Geographies:

• Space, Power, and Identity in the Middle East (First Year Seminar)

• Gender, Space, and Politics in the Middle East

• Borders and Boundaries (Triple I course with Nadia Yaqub and Jennifer Gates-Foster)