Pedagogy

In both my pedagogy and my work, I seek to actively dissolve disciplinary boundaries. I approach my scholarship and pedagogy the same way I would any other kind of creative collaboration: in reciprocal relationship with community—whether textual communities, scholarly ones, activist ones, class spaces, or otherwise. I am animated by a diverse range of inspirations, spanning from Buddhist stories, to queer theory, to literature of all genres, film, and of course, my many different conversation partners/friends. In the fall of 2022, I’m proud to have designed and taught a course called “Queering Buddhism: Gender, Sexuality, Liberatory Praxis” at Stanford University—a culmination of a personal project of mine to investigate the possibilities and constraints to queering or transforming any institution, and how the field of queer studies and feminist studies might constructively, and ethically be in conversation with Buddhist theories of liberation.

While I was a PhD student at Stanford University, I served as the co-president of the Buddhist Community at Stanford (BCAS) for three years, where I initiated a shift towards framing Buddhism as compassionate intersectionality rather than purely Buddhist identity, and helped to host a range of speakers, Buddhist and non-Buddhist, who are committed to an ethics of nonviolence, anti-racism, and moving beyond restrictive binaries. For my work as a co-leader and organizer, I received the 2021 Stanford Community Impact Award, and the 2022 Stanford Asian American Award for Graduate Leadership. The friendships formed from my work in BCAS have profoundly influenced the way I approach teaching and creating safe and supportive spaces for the reciprocal exchange of knowledge.