Maryam Griffin

Teaching

I approach teaching with a conviction that the space of the classroom is not so cleanly separated from the broader world; we are community members when we are on campus just as we are scholars when we move about our lives off-campus.  As such, I encourage students to always connect the information and ideas we engage in class with the thoughts and experiences they have accumulated beyond the classroom.

As a teacher, I aim to use educational tools to empower students. This involves developing students’ capacity to take responsibility for their own learning, to participate in the production of knowledge, and to engage ideas in both critical and socially responsible ways. I ask that students come to class with a genuine intellectual curiosity and a generous respect for those around them. It is my hope that the scholarly tools we hone together remain with students long after they leave my class.

Research/Scholarship

My research agenda is concerned with ordinary people’s movements—both physical and political—and how they confront law and state power in quotidian and spectacular ways. I am currently working on a book about Palestinian public transportation in the West Bank as a productive site of social struggle, where popular demands for freedom are expressed through implied and overt challenges to settler colonialism. I have previously worked on a study about the way college students of Middle Eastern descent organized to influence the way they are racialized and express their racial identities.