Brooklyn, New York, United States
Teaching is my first love. I have enjoyed being a teacher since 1965. I have taught at the high school level in Trinidad and Nigeria, and undergraduate and graduate courses at New York University, the City University of New York, The New School, and Teachers College, Columbia University. Since 1976, I acquired and administered over $8m of funding, which supported me as the principal investigator of many ethnographic research projects in several low-income, minority neighborhoods in New York City in the areas of drug use, misuse, production and distribution. I reported my findings in two books and several articles.I have also given presentations nationally and internationally at seminars, training workshops, professional and academic conferences, planning committees; and have served as an expert witness in courts of law. The projects made me knowledgeable about the environmental factors in the study sites that impinge upon the health and development of adults and children, their births, deaths, and the termination of pregnancies, such as exposure to toxic materials both in the home and on neighborhood streets, physical environments and living arrangements that are otherwise hazardous, exposure to various pathogens, parental or adult drug use and other behaviors that compromise care, neglect or abuse, violence, inadequate diet, inadequate on-going medical supervision and lack of access to timely healthcare. The focus on drug and alcohol use and abuse led to a preoccupation with STDs, HIV/AIDS, hepatitis and tuberculosis. I also observed a treasury of instances of learning and teaching, not only in schools, but more substantially in informal settings where a wide range of knowledge and knowledge-acquisition strategies was exchanged among an extremely heterodox population of interested participants.
Two courses: ITSF 4011 Social Bases of Education; ITSF 4018 Anthropology and Education in Africa.
Taught an undergraduate course, “Crime, Incarceration, and the City,” which examines theories of crime, crime in a cross-cultural perspective, the criminal justice system and mass incarceration in the U.S, and research related to these topics.
Southeast Asian Art
Taught graduate courses in anthropology. I was also one of four faculty members who convened the “Colloquium in Qualitative Field Methods:” first-year students were instructed in ethnographic methodologies in the Fall semester, while in Spring, second-year students presented papers reporting the results of their summer fieldwork. Projects were related to immigration, education, microeconomics, environmental policy, climate change etc