My graduate teaching at UC San Diego introduces and guides spatial thinking in students’ ongoing areas of interest and research.
COGR 241 Geography and Communication is a theory and methods class. It builds on a Critical Geography/Radical Geography approach that examines the uneven socio-political and ecological dimensions of processes of space production. The course expands this critical spatial thinking with interdisciplinary conversations across the social sciences and humanities and to do so, it engages a variety of spatial concepts that have proved to travel well across disciplines such as those of: Social space. Spatial Architectonics. Scale. Spatial Fix. Infrastructure-space. Experimental Space. Territorial Engineering. Emplacement. Place. Place-making. Landscape. Cartography. Mapping. Counter-mapping. Refusals. Decolonial Mapping. Cuerpo-Territorio. State Fixations. Enclosures. Extraction. Fugitive Landscapes. Spatial Justice. Commons. Undercommons. Uncommoning. Deliniking.
Many of my graduate mentoring and interdisciplinary thinking takes places in the Faculty and Graduate Working Group Nature, Space and Politics .
My undergraduate teaching at UC San Diego include cultural industries, consumer cultures and globalization; tourism and the built environment; the ideology and production of nature; capitalism and its ecologies; ethnographic methods. These are undergraduate courses that I often teach at UC San Diego:
COMM 100B Communication, Culture and Representation. This course is one of the four “pillars” of the undergraduate curriculum in the Department of Communication at UC San Diego. It explores the ways in which culture can be understood as the interplay between what humans create and the structures within which those creations are embedded. The goal of this course is for students to develop a critical awareness (or “presence of mind”) about the historically produced forms and structures of meaning-making in which we live and within which we participate.
COMM 181. Consumer Citizens. Explores the uneven nature of globalization and its geographical expression in the urban built environment by looking into gentrification processes, community change, consumer-citizen spaces and labor in service-oriented economies in the Global North and in the Global South. Hands on research involved work in shopping malls, theme parks, public plazas and parks, hotels and public transportation in and around the city of San Diego.
COMM 159. Tourism, Power and Place. Explores the tourism industry’s relations with power and place. It studies tourism encounters around the world to question the discourses, imaginaries and social practices involved in the production, consumption and re-production of stereotypical representations of otherness (place, nature, culture, bodies). The course introduces main theoretical concepts in the study of tourism from an anthropological lens (the tourist gaze, tourism stages, tourism encounters, tourism performances) and it strongly builds on ethnographic materials from around the world with a hands on research emphasis in San Diego, a city with one of the largest service economies in the world & US main craft brewery destination!
COMM 162. Advanced Studies in Cultural Industries: Framing the Other in Cultural Tourism. Cultural Tourism is one of the largest creative industries in the world and a powerful one when it comes to create images and experiences of cultural difference. This course critically explores the ways in which the cultural tourism industry -including culinary tourism, ethnographic tourism, literary and cinematographic tourism, ‘voluntourism’ and slum tourism among others- depicts other places and peoples for consumption purposes. We pay special attention to practices of framing the Other for tourists and to the consequences that such representations have upon other people’s everyday practices and lived spaces.
COMM 180. Advanced Studies in Communication Theory: Branding and Consuming Nature. This course discusses the processes of branding and consuming nature that are characteristic of globalization processes. It uses a sociocultural approach to analyze specific case studies where natural spaces and its resources have been commoditized through tourism planning, conservation policies and urban development. The course pays special attention to the practices of contestation and resistance to corporate globalization as encountered in our built environment.
COMM196A and COMM 196 B Honors Seminar. This seminar is designed to enable Communication students admitted to the Honors Program to conceptualize, research, and ultimately write a full-length Honors Thesis. Working in conjunction with a faculty adviser, each student will produce a substantial research essay (which may or may not incorporate a multimedia/web-based project) of no less than 40-50 pages exclusive of endnotes and bibliography. Along the way, Honors students will learn about how to ask research questions, how to think about different research methodologies, and how to use resources that will enable you to master a complex research agenda over a six-month period. You can see some of the Honors’ Students reflections on the Department of Communication’s Honors Program here.
COMM 106G. Tourism Global Industry and Cultural Form The largest industry in the world has far-reaching cultural ramifications. We explore tourism’s history and its contemporary cultural effects, taking the perspective of the “toured” as well as that of the tourist. Ethnographical up to date case studies from around the world will exemplify the major patterns that organize tourism as both and industry and a social phenomenon with deep cultural and spatial implications. The course’s weeks are designed to introduce and explore different tourism models including: resort tourism, cultural tourism, ecotourism and adventure tourism, slum tourism, volunteer tourism and indigenous luxury tourism.
COMM 179 Global Nature/Global Culture. Considers globalization’s impact on concepts of nature in and through media texts, information systems, circulation of consumer goods and services, the emergence of global brands, science, health initiatives, environmental media activism, technology transfer in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The course will understand globalization as a set of uneven interconnections and will pay especial attention to its spatial and socio-cultural dimensions. In the first weeks of the course, we will analyze and deconstruct the modernist binaries (local/global; nature/culture; masculine/feminine; North/South; West/the Rest etc.) that inform globalization debates and metaphors. We will then analyze through particular contemporary examples the uses and abuses of culture and nature within economic globalization processes, and explore the inequalities associated to branding for the new natural consumer, sweatshops and maquiladoras, the proliferation of global slums and reconstruction processes after “natural” crisis.
COMM152 Global Economy and Consumer Culture. This course critically examines social and economic forces that shape the making of global consumer cultures by following the flows of consumption and production between the developed and developing worlds in the 1990s until today. We will consider how consumers, workers, and citizens participate in a new globalized consumer culture that challenges older distinctions between the First and the Third World. In this course, we will focus on the flows between the U.S., Asia, and Latin America. We will ethnographically explore global commodity chains, global production networks and export-oriented industries paying special attention to the uneven production, distribution and consumption of apparel, food and cultural souvenirs.
COMM144E Gender, Labor and the Global Economy. This course introduces students to different theories of globalization and of gender. Against this theoretical background, students critically examine the gendered (and racialized) nature of labor in the production of material, social, and cultural goods in the global economy. Specifically, the course will understand the global economy as a process of accumulation by dispossession. It will pay a detailed attention to processes of symbolic violence, feminization of labor, international migration and poverty. We will ethnographically explore the export- oriented industries’ dependence on docile workers in maquiladoras and in the service economy; the controversies associated with reproductive labor through the experiences of domestic workers and sex workers; the articulation of shop floor politics and worker’s contestation practices in the tech, food and garment industries; as well as depersonalization processes in zones of social abandonment and extreme poverty. Empirical materials will pay special attention to women’s narratives on these issues around the world with a particular attention to the United States, Latin America and Asia.
COMM132 Advanced Studies in Communication, Politics and Society: The Politics of Nature. Specialized study of the production, consumption and mobilization of discourses about nature. Some of the topics that will be explored include: the marketing of natural brands and the production of natural consumers; the transformation of nature into spectacle; gardens as political tools; natural preservation policies and sustainable environmental planning.
COMM 190. Decolonial Theory. Are you interested in challenging contemporary cultural stereotypes based on gender and race? Are you willing to refuse extractive futures where nature and culture are put to work for the privileged classes? Do you want to learn how to refuse the violence inscribed in colonial representations of culture and the environment? This course provides a space to rethink the colonial structures of power that dominate mainstream ways to think, talk, write, communicate about and consume cultural differences and the environment. The course offers alternative ways of listening to other stories about the world beyond Western science and workshops ways to incorporate them in our everyday practice. We
I regularly advise Communication’s Senior Undergraduate Students as part of their Academic Internship Programs UC, San Diego (AIP) and I enjoy working with undegraduate students as part of the Undergraduate Instructional Apprentice Program (UGIA) I regularly serve in the Fulbright Program on campus.