Teaching

I have developed courses for graduate-level students as well as classes for post-graduate certificate students at California Institute of Integral Studies. I have also taught Integrative Seminar, a Master’s capstone class, for the CIIS Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness as well as Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion programs, developed by Dr. Elizabeth Allison.

Arboreal Philosophy (MA/PhD)

Trees and forests as indispensable ecological partners have been central to human life since its inception. While, in Western culture, trees have often been treated as mere resource or scenery, nevertheless trees have their own unique modes of being separate from human purposes, and recent research increasingly demonstrates trees to have capacities including communication, intelligence, and agency. How would human interactions with trees and forests change if these arboreal capacities were recognized? In this course, we will examine such questions in an interdisciplinary and integral manner by attending to arboreality in Western thought and culture. We will discuss key ideas and thinkers in the emerging field of plant studies or plant humanities, including Matthew Hall (Plants as Persons), Michael Marder (Plant-Thinking), Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass), and Monica Gagliano (Thus Spoke the Plant), and connect thinking on trees and forests globally the devastating environmental consequences of deforestation and climate change. Theoretical coursework will be grounded in our own personal and embodied experiences of trees, forests, and arboreality in all of its dimensions.

Thinking with Vegetal Life (MA/PhD)

Following what has been called the Vegetal Turn in the humanities, this course will consider plants themselves as well as their entwinements with humans. Plants have been shown to communicate, learn, remember, and recognize their kin, among other capacities. Some plant studies scholars suggest plants may have intelligence, agency, or even sentience and consciousness and that ethical consideration be expanded to include vegetal personhood and rights. Such thinking interrogates received hierarchies and anthropocentric worldviews, opening questions about possible phyto-informed perspectives. We will address human-plant relationships from historical roots to contemporary understandings of plants primarily in philosophy, religion, and the arts along with discussions of potential implications for ecological policy, agriculture, and forestry. Our theoretical coursework will be complemented by personal and embodied experiences with vegetal beings.