Teaching

My journey with philosophy began in earnest with phenomenology, where I discovered writing that entwined the intellectual with the affective and encouraged drawing from bodily and experiential knowledge in understanding texts and world. Like literature, certain philosophical texts moved me, and those that did helped to organize the images of my life into experiences, the frameworks for which the texts carried as ideas. This early recognition of philosophy as a pathway to aesthetic experience shapes how I create learning environments today. Drawing on phenomenology’s emphasis on lived experience and embodied knowledge, I strive to cultivate what María Lugones calls a “playful” attitude in the classroom—not in the sense of frivolity, but as an approach that enables multiple ways of knowing and being to emerge. Just as phenomenology taught me to attend to the lived dimensions of philosophical concepts, I encourage students to discover how philosophical ideas illuminate their own experiences while remaining open to the diverse ways these ideas manifest across different cultural and personal contexts.