Teaching

I approach teaching politics from the premise that power is simultaneously institutional and personal. In The Power of the Powerless, Václav Havel argues that the line of conflict—and political power—in a post-totalitarian system runs through each person: from the greengrocer to the apparatchik, no individual is wholly outside the system nor merely its passive victim. The image, introduced in one of my first comparative politics courses, acquired a new meaning when I encountered Georg Simmel and social network analysis. Reading Simmel alongside Maya Sen and Omar Wasow’s account of race as a ‘bundle of sticks’ led me to understand political identities as layered bundles of social positions and relationships, including families, gender, race, ethnicity, class, professions, and wider social connections. Political science teaching should similarly connect theories of states, markets, and regimes to the people who create and experience them. My courses pursue this goal through three commitments: informed empathy and Socratic inquiry; multimedia, interdisciplinary, and multimethod learning; and cumulative, research-oriented projects that invite students to participate in constructing knowledge.

At USC, my teaching has ranged from introductory discussion sections to graduate methods instruction and undergraduate research supervision. As a teaching assistant for \textit{Introduction to International Relations}, I independently prepared and led two weekly sections, developed applied comparisons and debates, advised students on final policy projects, and provided structured feedback on their arguments and evidence. Thirty-six students completed evaluations across the two sections, for response rates of 78 and 72 percent. Average ratings across course design, instruction, inclusion, assessment, and course impact ranged from 3.80 to 3.82 on a four-point scale. Students described the classroom as ``relaxed and welcoming'' and discussions as open and productive. One reported that finding country-level evidence broadened their understanding of the Global South; another described me as ``respectful of everyone's opinions'' while pushing students beyond familiar answers. I have also taught mathematical notation, statistical reasoning, and R across three iterations of USC's graduate R and Math Bootcamp, first as a teaching assistant and then twice as lead instructor. I further led a three-month methods sequence for undergraduate researchers, supervised undergraduate research assistants, and co-chaired the POIR Quantitative Working Group. Teaching students with widely varying technical backgrounds has reinforced my conviction that access to the research process should begin early and extend across methodological approaches.

My teaching philosophy starts from a phrase I have borrowed from Kaiser Kuo, host of the Chinese politics-focused Sinica podcast and former guitarist for the Chinese rock band Tang Dynasty. I ask students to approach political actors, institutions, historical events, and, most crucially, one another with informed empathy: recognition and respect for another person's worldview, informed by evidence, an awareness of one's own positionality, and humility about the limits of outside understanding. Informed empathy does not require agreement, moral equivalence, or the suspension of judgment. It instead elevates understanding, recognition, and interpretation by asking students to understand a position before evaluating it, connect institutions to their lived consequences, and identify precisely where disagreement begins while respecting one another's boundaries and experiences.

This orientation is especially important when teaching about authoritarian regimes such as China’s, and it has been informed by my own research on elite politics. From the Great Leap Forward famine and Cultural Revolution under Mao to the 1989 crackdown under Deng, China’s leaders have been responsible for profound human suffering. Recognizing the humanity of the political actors who designed, implemented, or participated in these systems neither diminishes that suffering nor absolves them of responsibility; it is necessary for understanding how authoritarian power operates through individuals rather than abstractions. The same principle requires students to resist flattening Chinese citizens, party members, and government employees into undifferentiated extensions of the party-state. Students should likewise understand how Orientalism, racism, and gender have shaped the study of China from the United States and other Western perspectives, while avoiding romanticism and explanations that treat “culture” as a self-evident cause. Yangyang Cheng, a physicist and writer on Chinese politics and science, compares Western scholarship on China to an X-ray: it can reveal internal structures missed by an external examination, yet too often erases the body, mind, and spirit of the patient. My goal is to help students recognize how positionality shapes what scholarship reveals, obscures, or distorts, and to develop with them more holistic ways of understanding political power and its lived consequences.

The Socratic method, which was central to my own undergraduate coursework at Reed College, translates these commitments into classroom practice. I move from brief framing lectures into guided questions that make an argument's structure visible: What does a theory assume? How would the world look if it were correct? Which cases challenge it? What evidence would permit a responsible answer? I use these questions not to place students on the spot, but to turn the classroom into a collaborative investigation. Because students differ in how readily they formulate ideas aloud, participation can also take the form of questions submitted before class, short memos, small-group conversations, or contributions to an online forum that I bring into collective discussion. These routes preserve a high expectation of preparation while ensuring that intellectual participation is not confused with confidence, speed, or familiarity with a particular classroom culture.

Power manifests along every element of the chain from state to society—in the pronouncements of leaders and in everyday acts of accommodation and resistance. Students can understand it only by moving up and down political structures: comparatively across states, regimes, and regions; between foreign observers and domestic scholarship; and from elite policy documents to the testimony of those who lived with their consequences. This motivates my efforts to pair political science research with memoirs, diaries, speeches, maps, photographs, paintings, propaganda, films, and statistics. Each medium carries distinct voices, silences, and forms of authority, encouraging students to ask who produced a source, for whom, and what kind of political reality it permits us to see..

This approach grew from my undergraduate mentorship with Douglas Fix. My first scholarly publication, on the gendered labor behind nineteenth-century Taiwanese tea production, combined customs and consular reports, colonial investigations, firm records, and photographs. In my favorite undergraduate course on the history of rice in East Asia, Fix moved us from scientific studies and artistic depictions to the colonial political economy of Taiwan's ponlai rice and an opera about the snails that consumed it. That course, and his others, became my model for designing classes in which unexpected sources illuminate how political systems enter everyday life.

In my planned Contemporary Chinese Politics course, students will each be assigned a province and trace that province's political, economic, and social dynamics across a range of issue areas in domestic Chinese politics. Students will further combine international and translated Chinese scholarship with speeches, memoirs, social media posts, and primary policy documents so they can study first-hand the dynamics of state-society relations in China and how policies translate into directly shaping the lives of Chinese citizens. In Comparative Politics of East Asia, students would encounter the central concerns of comparative politics through comparisons across Northeast and Southeast Asia such as state formation, colonial rule, development, democratization, ethnicity, gender, and social movements.

The same pluralism extends to my approach to methodology. Although my own research is primarily positivist and combines statistical analysis, networks, interviews, and archival sources, Sherry Zaks's Research Design course in my PhD program illustrated the critical value of giving equal weight to quantitative and qualitative, positivist and interpretivist scholarship. Their example informs my own; I teach methods as choices grounded in substantive questions, ethical responsibilities, and different ways of building knowledge. Whether students encounter a regression table, an interview, a propaganda poster, or an archive, I ask how concepts became observations, which voices entered the evidence, and how alternative choices might change the conclusion.

My undergraduate education at Reed demonstrated how much students can accomplish when treated as participants in producing knowledge rather than passive recipients of it. I organize assignments as cumulative projects that make knowledge construction visible: moving from concepts and theory through source selection, measurement or interpretation, causal identification, argument, and revision. Smaller assignments become building blocks for a larger product, and structured peer review lets students experience critique as part of research rather than as a verdict delivered after it is finished.

For Comparative Political Economy of Development, I have designed a semester-long project in which each student follows a commodity or sector—such as gold, semiconductors, forestry, or tourism—across several countries. As the course moves from developmental states, investment, trade, infrastructure, and crises to aid and microfinance, students repeatedly revisit how those forces shape their sector's labor, environmental, distributive, and political consequences. The final collaborative presentation asks students to compare two sectors, making both the value and the limits of comparison explicit. In my \textit{Authoritarian Politics} syllabus, country-centered investigations would embed repression, co-optation, censorship, coups, resistance, and democratic backsliding in the experiences of people confronting abuses of authority.

My experience teaching methods has reinforced the value of beginning this training early. Across three iterations of USC's graduate R and Math Bootcamp, first as a teaching assistant and then twice as lead instructor, I taught mathematical notation, statistical reasoning, and R to students with widely varying backgrounds. I have also led a three-month methods sequence for undergraduate researchers, supervised undergraduate RAs, and co-chaired the POIR Quantitative Working Group. I begin by helping students identify substantive questions of interest, then introduce mathematics or code as tools for clarifying assumptions and evaluating evidence. Students predict what an analysis should do, work through examples by hand, modify and diagnose code, and explain results in ordinary language. The objective is neither to make every student a methodologist nor to privilege technical evidence, but to give them access to tools they can use and the confidence to assess how others use them.