Youjin B. Chung

Teaching Philosophy

My teaching philosophy is influenced by critical, feminist, and engaged pedagogies that consider the classroom as one of the most radical spaces of possibility in the academy. I encourage my students to think of the classroom as a 'transgressive' space (following bell hooks) where they feel free to challenge established ideas, concepts, and theories and experiment with new ways of seeing, thinking, and knowing.

In my classrooms, I strive to challenge and support my students in pursuing the following learning objectives: 1) to develop their sociological imagination by reflecting critically on how their personal experiences of power, privilege, and marginalization shape their understanding of wider society; 2) to question the everyday, including the categories, classifications, and assumptions that they take for granted; and 3) to think historically by recognizing how our knowledges of the past and present are mutually constitutive and co-evolving.