Once I completed my foray into traditional, institutional university life (at University of California, Berkeley), I finally laid claim to being “educated”. I even decided to continue in that direction, and completed my MA in Agrarian and Environmental Studies at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in The Hague, Netherlands, and then my PhD from ISS.
However, I know that education is much more than formal school, and so I am always making efforts to educate and be educated outside of that sphere. For instance, I have been co-organizing a monthly event for community building and political education around agroecology, at a local urban farm, since January 2025.
I have long taught farming skills via non-profit urban farm projects, and do informal and formal workshops on food justice, global sustainability, and social change organizing. I used to teach permaculture, sustainable design, and global environmental transitions with the Urban Permaculture Institute of San Francisco. In mid-2020 I designed a series of short classes to benefit PLACE for Sustainable Living on “Organic Gardening and Revolutionary Politics“, and co-facilitated the PACE ‘Partners Advancing Climate Equity‘ program in 2021-2022.
In Fall of 2022, I began my new position as a full-time, tenure-track assistant professor in the Anthropology, Geography, and Environmental Studies department at Cal State University, East Bay, located in Hayward, California. It’s wonderful, so far! My students are great, and although teaching in public universities in the age of so-called “AI” holds its challenges (partly because such universities are nearly always overseen by business-class administrators with little seeming dedication to the values of public education, and a thirst for austerity, raising tuition, and denying employees just compensation), I am blessed to teach about subjects I care about, to students who often have never been exposed to such subjects before.
I have taught at universities and colleges for some time, including during Fall 2017, when I was invited to lead a course on “Agriculture and Social Justice Movements” at UC Santa Cruz. (Taught again in 2019, and in January 2021). In 2020, I experienced the dynamics of moving an experiential, in-person class online due to COVID; “Race, Gender, and Food Justice” I designed on request for the Environmental Studies department at University of San Francisco. Before that, I taught strategies and resources for community-university partnerships around urban food systems, through the Urban Agriculture Minor at University of San Francisco. In Summer of 2013 I co-taught an undergraduate-level Urban Agriculture Course at the California Institute of Integral Studies. In 2012, I taught a class of my own design at UC Berkeley, “Human Nature Studies”, which I hope to revisit someday in other venues. I’ve also given guest lectures at universities and community colleges in California and New York, including Stanford, Yale, UC Berkeley, NYU, and City College of San Francisco.
I’d love to come to your university, community center, urban farm, treehouse, or floating city to conduct workshops, seminars, talks, or facilitated meetings.
I also read a lot, and write academic articles and more popular education-focused pieces, some of which I have linked to in the Writing and Publishing page.