Teaching

Upcoming courses offered at McGill
Fall 2024: SOCI601 (“Qualitative Research Methods 2”)
Spring 2025: SOCI235 (“Technology & Society”) & SOCI345 (“Social and Intimate Relationships in the Digital Age”)

At UC Berkeley, I teach an interdisciplinary university seminar called “Artificial Intelligence & Society: The Promises and Limits of Technological Futures.” The class is offered in Spring 2024 (and previously in Spring and Fall 2023). Here’s a brief description of the course:

Little of our lives today remains untouched by Artificial Intelligence (AI), which makes understanding its reach and influence on society increasingly pertinent. This course uses an interdisciplinary approach to critically dissect AI's origins, proliferation, and ubiquity from social, political, and philosophical angles. We explore questions such as: what makes intelligence of this kind ‘artificial,’ and how does it differ from other types of intelligence, such as those embodied by humans or animals? What is the relationship between AI, natural language processing, machine learning, big data, and algorithms? Why is it so difficult to create AI systems that align with human values? How can we critically examine the production processes of generative, multimodal, and large language models to understand who they help and leave behind? By incorporating academic research, sci-fi literature, films, and a variety of guest lectures by AI practitioners, this course offers a dynamic look at the promises and limits of AI in delivering a utopic technological future.

Beyond AI, I also teach two other digital sociology courses related to my research. In the Summer of 2022, I designed and taught “The Give and Take: Sociology of the Sharing Economy,” a class that explores the rise of the gig and peer-to-peer economy. Students in this course critically analyzed emerging market forms and the fast-changing world of alternative consumption.

“What Makes Us Click: Online Dating in the Age of Modern Romance,” featured on NPR in 2018, focuses on sociological perspectives that help students understand the broader cultural patterns and implications of platform and data-driven orientations toward relationship formation. This class was offered in Spring 2021 and Summer 2021.

In recognition of my devotion to teaching, I was awarded the Herbert Blumer Fellowship for Excellence in Teaching, the Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award, the Certificate in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, and the Teaching Effectiveness Award for Graduate Student Instructors at UC Berkeley. Click to read the qualifying essay for this last award, “Going Public: Designing Writing Assignments with Social Impact.“