أمير عزيز
Teaching
I have taught various undergraduate courses, as the sole instructor, in the fields of Ethnic Studies, Gender and Women's Studies, Queer and Trans Studies, Asian American Studies, Carceral Studies, and Middle Eastern Studies. In May 2023, I received the Distinguished Contributions to Undergraduate Education award by Rutgers University's School of Arts and Sciences, in recognition of teaching and mentorship excellence in Prison Abolition; Feminist Theory; and Gender, Ethnicity, Representation across six years.
I offer broad survey and specialized courses such as Introduction to Arab American Studies; Transgender Studies; Queer & Trans Ethnic Studies; Theorizing Settler Colonialism; Comparative South Asian & West Asian American Literatures & Films; Islam in America; and Feminist & Queer Disability Studies.
I approach the classroom as a collaborative learning space, accessible to students of all abilities and capacities, encouraging them to think creatively across disciplines, interests, and geographies and making connections between theory (intellectual conceptualization) and practice (putting skills and principles into praxis).
JUMP TO SECTION
Course Offerings
ETHNIC, FEMINIST & GENDER STUDIES
Gender, Ethnicity, Representation
This course explores intersections of gender, ethnicity, and culture through the lens of representation. What is representation and how does it develop via the nexus of gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and culture? Drawing from Ethnic and Gender Studies, we examine structures of power underpinning racism, misogyny, anti-Blackness, homophobia, transmisogyny, and xenophobia, challenging students to understand the ways we are situated within them. View my syllabus.
Prison Abolition: Anti-Racist & Feminist Perspectives
This course offers a comprehensive historical and theoretical foundation of abolitionist advocacy in the U.S. What conditions have sedimented an acceptance of a so-called carceral ‘common sense’ in the U.S.? What intellectual and activist practices might we develop via feminist and anti-racist critiques of incarceration? We will engage with theories of accountability and transformative justice to address harm and towards critical intervention in a time of mass incarceration. View my syllabus.
Ethnicity, Gender, Social Curation in Digital Media
Curation – a task historically associated with museum professionals – has now become a quotidian chore in our digitally driven lives. With the digitization of everyday life where everything must be rendered visible online to be 'real,' we will ask new questions about forms of being produced by interactions of the digital and non-digital. How do ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and ability translate from IRL to URL to IRL? How does the digital reproduce or subvert forms of power? View my syllabus.
Gender, Women, and Politics
in South-West Asia & North Africa
This course introduces students to contemporary themes and debates in the study of women and the state, women's politics, femininities and masculinities, and state and local responses to feminist movements in the transcontinental region broadly called South-West Asia and North Africa (SWANA), especially the opportunities and constraints that women and gender/sexual minorities face after the 'Arab Spring.' View my syllabus.
Prison Literatures of South-West Asia & North Africa
This course explores contemporary prison literatures, novels, non-fiction texts, and writings in South-West Asia and North Africa (SWANA). Particular emphasis is placed on those written or produced by/about women and gender non-normative individuals of the SWANA region and diasporas. We will examine how tropes and realities of imprisonment are depicted, narrativized, and read across political and cultural settings, retelling how minoritized ethnic, gendered, and sexed groups encounter, challenge, and narrate imprisonment. View my syllabus.
Feminist Theory: Historical Perspectives
We are in the midst of upheaval and struggles that will dominate our lifetime and lifetimes to come, from rising authoritarian governments to engulfing forms of disaster capitalism, ecocide, and climate change. This courses hones in on theoretical and historical texts resonating with political struggles and those on the horizon. Reading from feminist, queer, decolonial, and ethnic studies, we will query what feminist theory is and if it does or does not matter. We begin with the premise that theoretical production is deeply driven from the fabric of everyday struggles.
QUEER & TRANS STUDIES
Introduction to Transgender Studies
This course introduces contemporary theories, themes, and debates on transgender and genderqueer lives and lived realities; cultural aspects of gender/sex diversity; and transgender subjectivity as embedded in assemblages of gender, sex, sexuality, ability, ethnicity, and class. We will examine how Transgender Studies has challenged and/or enhanced thinking in Feminist, Queer, Gender, and Ethnic studies as academic and activist fields of engagement. View my syllabus.
Queer & Trans Ethnic Studies
This course engages in queer and trans of color theorizing as scholarly inquiry and political project, examining the mutual constitution of racial/imperial projects with normalizing practices of gender and sexual categorization. We will unpack its critiques of white normativity in Queer studies and cisheteronormativity in Ethnic & Gender studies, as well as the gender and sexual politics of settler colonialism, namely how Indigenous and Two-Spirit scholars identify and exceed the limits of this scholarship.
Feminist & Queer Disability Studies
This course takes the critical lenses of feminist and queer theory to interrogate bodyminds norms at the intersections of (dis)ability, gender, race, and sexuality. Employing a decolonial approach, students will learn to consider the manifold social and historical processes by which multiple kinds of gendered and racialized bodily difference have been stigmatized, as well as the uneasy relationship of Disability studies to the pathologizing practices of gendered/racialized medical care and public health.
Islam & Gender/Sex Nonconformity:
An Interdisciplinary Inquiry
“Is Islam naturally opposed to women’s rights and sexual diversity?” Such a question, blunt as it may be, goes right to the heart of popularized perceptions of Islam as innately adverse to gender and sexual nonconformity. Rather than answering with a definitive ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ this course readily takes up the challenge in such a question by exploring how Qur’ānic and Islamic texts and scholars have sought to understand issues of gender, sex, and sexuality across religious and social life. View my syllabus.
ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES
Introduction to Arab American Studies
This course offers a comprehensive introduction to Arab American histories, literatures, and cultures from the U.S. nineteenth century to the contemporary era. Topics include the political, literary, and cinematic productions of Arab immigrants and diasporic communities in the U.S., particularly how they explore conceptions of home, identity, and community. Students will conduct original work in Arab American Studies that promotes critical thinking and student-centered research. View my syllabus.
Comparative South Asian and West Asian American Literatures & Films
Various cultural works have examined the mutual intersections in the historical experiences of South Asian and West Asian Americans, challenging a tendency to see them as disparate categories. This course looks at how South Asian and West Asian American authors and artists explore questions of belonging, desire, and diaspora, emphasizing the pluralities of South Asian and West Asian American subjectivities and their historical and cultural continuities within Asian America. View my syllabus.
Transfeminist & Queer Asian America
This course explores the myriad ways in which queer, transgender, femme, and genderqueer Asian Americans navigate issues of ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, ability, and belonging in the U.S. Rather than locating an essentialist trans/queer Asian American identity, this course emphasizes the diversified breadth of transgender, queer, and feminist Asian America beyond cultural stereotypes and challenges colonial and cisnormative frameworks of sex, gender, and sexuality. View my syllabus.
Islam in America
As the fastest growing minority faith in the U.S., Islam is a religion with deep roots in the Americas dating to the 1500s. This course explores the histories of Muslims in the Americas from its origins in the trans-Atlantic slave trade to the present. We will also explore the significance of U.S. Muslims post-9/11 by studying South Asian, South-East Asian, Arab, and South-West Asian Muslim groups in comparative perspective, with attention to gender, ethnicity, and class in constructing Muslim American subjectivities.
SETTLER COLONIALISM STUDIES
Theorizing Settler Colonialism
This course examines settler colonialism in its myriad political, economic, and cultural formations and Indigenous, First Nation, and Aboriginal resistances to settler-colonial domination. We will study various historical and contemporary contexts, from Turtle Island in the Americas, Hawai'i, Algeria, Palestine, and South Africa, to the Pacific Ocean (particularly Kanaky/New Caledonia), Australia, and Aotearoa/New Zealand. We will complicate notions of 'settler' and 'native', examining their relationship through transnational labor and migration and constructions of nationhood, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality.
Gender, Sexuality, and Settler Colonialism
This course looks at how various political and cultural formations of gender and sexuality function in historical and contemporary settler-colonial contexts. We will explore how Indigenous feminist activists and scholars respond to historical and ongoing resource extraction, land dispossession, and settler-colonial violence in contexts like the U.S., Palestine, and Australia. We will also critically examine how gender and sexuality in their various historical and contemporary manifestations have been conscripted to further settler-colonial domination.