TEACHING PHILOSOPHY
My research on religion, politics, and gendered life—grounded in ethnographic and archival studies on conservative Muslim women in Turkey—directly informs my teaching of critical feminist theory around translation, difference, and power. As an anthropologist, I teach how to theorize through empirically grounded accounts of the social world. My primary goal is to help students understand, analyze, and communicate the historical, social, and cultural conditions that shape both lived experience and theoretical vocabularies through which we make sense of it. In my class, students learn to interpret discourses in historical and cultural contexts, unpack the power relations that shape them, and connect them to their own experiences. They also learn to build cohesive, well-grounded arguments and communicate their ideas in various formats. Over time, students cultivate intellectual generosity toward themselves, their surroundings, and forms of life they cannot fully grasp by approaching difference with care and interpretive humility.
TEACHING & ADVISING PRACTICES
My teaching at the University of Chicago has been formative in developing my approach to higher education, centering equity, inclusion, and intellectual generosity. While I have taught a range of courses, I have most developed my ability to connect challenging material with diverse students through social theory core seminars and lower-division electives in Anthropology and the interdisciplinary Human Rights program. These courses bring together students with varied backgrounds, disciplinary orientations, career goals, and levels of interest in the subject. To teach effectively across a diverse student body with equity and inclusion in mind, I organize my pedagogy around three interconnected dimensions: course design, in-class practices, and assessment.
Course Design. To support regular engagement, I use two strategies. First, I design my syllabus around a single, broadly relevant question that addresses a shared condition. In "Self, Culture, and Society," for example, I frame Smith, Marx, and Weber’s analyses of capitalist political economy around “Why are we so pressed for time?” This framing gives students a clear sense of relevance and a reason to engage. Second, I combine classic texts with contemporary scholarship, especially from authors in marginalized positions, as well as ethnographies and multimedia materials. This pairing broadens the perspectives, contexts, and methods brought to the shared question. In "Colonizations," for instance, I paired a documentary on the Arab Spring in Tunisia, "A Revolution in Four Seasons," with historical readings on post-Ottoman nation-state building. The visual material made the stakes of political reforms more vivid and accessible for students unfamiliar with the regional context. Third, because students enter the classroom with different levels of preparedness, I provide clear conceptual scaffolding so that students can enter difficult conversations from different starting points, and intellectual challenge does not depend on prior exposure to specialized vocabulary. These strategies lay the groundwork for students to develop interpretive skills attentive to historical and cultural contexts.
In-Class Practices. To keep students engaged, I use exercises that connect close and critical reading with their own perspectives, experiences, and intellectual generosity. First, I structure participation through multiple forms of engagement—short writing, small-group discussion, and whole-class conversation—so that students have different ways to communicate their ideas. Weekly reading posts and anonymous exit notes allow students who may be less comfortable speaking publicly to raise questions, while giving me the flexibility to respond to students’ needs. Second, I encourage students to connect mundane, personal episodes to the class theme. For instance, when reading Mauss’s “Techniques of the Body” in "Self, Culture, and Society," every student shared a bodily “technique” they have acquired based on a five-minute-in-class writing, such as using chopsticks, cornrowing hair, or dribbling a basketball. Such exercises help students recognize the diverse trajectories represented in the classroom. This recognition fosters an environment where students can engage challenging topics with mutual respect and generosity. After substantive discussion, I use students’ contributions to return to the assigned texts and distill them into a key takeaway. This allows students to see the class as an evolving conversation. Third, I make academic conventions explicit rather than assuming students already know how to navigate them. For instance, I always unpack different academic genres and the logic behind citational practices. These practices help reduce the extent to which prior educational access determines students’ ability to succeed.
Assessment. I design assignments that help students build cohesive, well-grounded arguments and communicate their ideas in various formats. To support this learning goal, I use two strategies. First, I emphasize the interconnection between reading and writing. In "Translating Human Rights," an elective course on contemporary ethnographies of human rights problems, students learned to write a grant proposal for ethnographic and archival research. To guide them into this new genre of academic writing, I analyze how each ethnographic and historical work we read poses a question and aligns empirical data to address it, drawing students’ attention to the logic of research design and methods. Through this reverse engineering, students learn to treat assigned readings as resources for developing their own writing. Second, I break major assignments into smaller stages so that students can begin early and receive feedback throughout the process. For the research proposal assignment, I provided a concrete guideline and a successful sample, met with students during office hours in the first three weeks to discuss potential topics, offered detailed written feedback on a first draft submitted around midterm, and had students give an individual presentation two weeks before the final submission to receive peer feedback. This iterative process helps students articulate their curiosity while giving me a clearer basis to evaluate their learning, effort, and progress.
Advising. I have mentored undergraduate and graduate students, helping them navigate coursework, develop research interests, and pursue their academic and professional goals. I write letters of recommendation based on sustained conversations and close observation of their work. As an advisor, I communicate expectations and responsibilities clearly while remaining attentive to individual circumstances and needs. When students encounter difficulties, I work with them to identify practical strategies rather than treating a setback as a fixed measure of their ability. For example, when a student struggled with chronic tardiness and keeping up with course requirements, I helped them develop tools to visualize and track their time. This individualized approach helped them regain control of their coursework while also developing a transferable skill for future academic work. In sum, I see advising as a collaborative process through which students learn to identify their own goals, recognize the resources available to them, and develop the confidence to pursue them.
