My teaching helps students move from personal experience and public debate to sociological explanation. I ask students to identify social mechanisms, compare competing interpretations, evaluate different forms of evidence, and communicate their findings to both academic and public audiences.

I treat sociological theory not as a collection of abstract names and definitions, but as a set of tools for asking better questions. In my courses, students use theory to examine familiar issues such as work, housing, health, political participation, social movements, inequality, and generational conflict. My courses also emphasize evidence-building: students learn how interviews, observations, statistics, policy documents, historical materials, and media data can support different kinds of claims, and I encourage them to compare evidence, recognize uncertainty, and distinguish description, interpretation, and causal explanation.

At UC San Diego, I have served as Instructor of Record for SOCI 148: Political Sociology (Summer 2026) and SOCI 111: Local Lives, Global Problems (Summer 2025). I mentor 10 undergraduate researchers through the UCSD Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program, and my teaching has been recognized with the 2024 SAGE Publishing Keith Roberts Teaching Innovations Award.

In addition to university teaching, I founded Media NOON and developed the Media Activism School in South Korea, a six-month public education program that has trained more than 60 participants in human-rights journalism and media activism. That work continues to shape my classroom approach, teaching me how to make complex social issues accessible and design collaborative projects for students with different backgrounds.