My teaching philosophy is grounded in the belief that psychology must be taught not only as a science of the mind and consciousness, but as a discipline embedded in history, politics, culture, and ethics. I ask my students—and myself—to consider: What kind of Subject does psychology presuppose? What kinds of Subjects does it produce under specific material and ideological conditions? I foreground the role of material conditions of our world in shaping psychic life, and encourage students to analyse how psychological categories often pathologize the effects of exploitation, precarity, and inequality. At the same time, we explore how critical, collective, and emancipatory traditions can offer tools to resist dominant narratives, and imagine new forms of subjectivity and social relation within psychology, and without.
I have designed and taught a wide range of undergraduate courses that reflect this commitment to intellectual plurality and social relevance. These include foundational courses like Introduction to Psychology, Thinking Like a Psychologist, and History and Systems of Psychology, which equip students with conceptual clarity while encouraging them to trace psychology’s paradigmatic shifts and epistemological assumptions. I also pay close attention to writing as a form of thinking, and my course Writing Like a Psychologist focuses not only on the technical aspects of academic writing, but also on navigating the complexities of expressing the nuanced and often abstract dimensions of human experience, that is, on affect, which is central to psychological inquiry.
My formation as a mental health care provider deeply shapes how I approach the teaching of clinical psychology. In courses such as Introduction to Clinical Psychology, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Theories in Counselling Psychology, and Community Mental Health, I invite students to engage with frameworks of diagnosis and intervention while also interrogating their underlying assumptions. These courses foreground the ethical complexities of therapeutic practice, the enduring relevance of unconscious life, and the structural forces that contour suffering and healing. My elective offerings—such as Critical Disability and Inclusion Studies, Environment and Psyche, and Space and Psychology—extend the discipline’s boundaries by incorporating insights from critical theory, disability studies, and psychogeography. These courses challenge students to consider how bodies, minds, and environments are co-constituted, and how space, access, and normativity shape psychological experience.
Across all my teaching, I integrate diverse methodologies so that students can inhabit psychology as a methodologically rich and interdisciplinary field. At its core, my teaching is animated by the desire to build reflective, dialogic, and inclusive classrooms—spaces where students can think with freedom, speak with care, and come to see psychological life not as isolated interiority, but as shaped by histories of capital, labour, caste, gender, and empire. After all, the university is a site for reclaiming subjectivity from structures of domination and alienation—and for making it available as a terrain for collective transformation.