I am a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies Department at the University of Minnesota. My areas of research interest include: feminist and queer ethics, feminist pedagogies, blogging and troublemaking. I frequently write about feminist pedagogy and blogging on my three blogs: (making/being in/staying in)TROUBLE, Unchained, and It’s Diablogical! I have used blogs in my feminist classroom for over three years now. I am particularly proud of my blogs for these four courses: GWSS 3004: Contemporary Feminist Debates, GWSS 4403: Queering Theory, GWSS 5103: Feminist Pedagogies, and GWSS 8190: Feminist and Queer Explorations in Troublemaking.

During the summer of 2009 I fell in love with blogging. Sure I had been using blogs in my classes since January 2007, but it wasn’t until I started writing in my own blog in May 2009 that I realized what a powerful space for radical transformation, critical and creative expression and community-building it is. Now it is over a year later and blogs play a central role in all aspects of my life as a thinker, learner, writer, teacher and researcher. I use my personal and course blogs to archive my ideas, to document my research, to put seemingly disparate ideas or representations into conversation, to offer up various accounts of myself, to build relationships with visible and invisible/known and unknown readers, to experiment with pedagogical techniques, to cultivate effective writing and thinking habits, to disrupt the rigid rules and disciplinary borders that discourage new ideas and unexpected connections, to lay bare my own thinking/writing/learning/researching process, to practice what I preach (I mean teach), to develop connections between my different academic selves (the thinker/writer/scholar/teacher/activist), and to remind myself and hopefully others that being a thinker/learner/educator can be energizing and fun. Finally, I use blogs to make trouble by rejecting rigid boundaries between disciplines, finding creative ways to connect my research with my life, and infusing my ideas with a playful sense of humor.

Addendum (October 2010): Partly inspired by all of the blogging this summer (with KCF and on my other blogs), I am experimenting even more with blogs in my two classes this semester. Check them out: Feminist Pedagogies:GWSS 5103 and Queering Desire: GWSS 4790. You can also check my twitter accounts for the classes (femped2010 and qued2010) or my personal twitter account (undisciplined).

Addendum (March 2011): Here is a list of the blogs for my three classes this semester. I must admit that I might have taken on too much by using blogs in all three classes (especially  with one of the classes having 115 students!): Politics of Sex, Feminist Debates, and Queer/ing Ethics. This semester I decided to have one twitter account for all three classes: gwssprof

Here is a link list of the blogs that I have created/managed at the University of Minnesota through UThink:

2007
Pop Culture Women
International Feminist Theory

2008
Queering Theory
Rebels, Radicals, Revolutionaries
Introduction to GLBT Studies
Feminist Pedagogies

2009
Contemporary Feminist Debates
Feminist and Queer Explorations in Troublemaking
Feminist Pedagogies
Queering Theory

2010
Feminist Debates
Feminist/Queer/Troublemaking
Queering Desire
Feminist Pedagogies

2011
Feminist Debates, Spring
Politics of Sex
Queer/ing Ethics
Feminist Debates, Fall
Queering Theory