Introduction to critical theory
From the Frankfurt School to contemporary Latin American currents. What makes a theory critical rather than merely descriptive.
Undergraduate and postgraduate
I teach as facilitation, not as lecture: the group arrives with knowledge — from their discipline, their neighbourhood, their body — and the work is to put it in conversation with the texts until both move. I come from philosophy, so close reading is the centre; I come from activism, so the question is always what that text does in the world.
Available for semester-long courses, modular seminars or single masterclasses, at undergraduate, postgraduate and upper-secondary level, in person (Guadalajara and region), hybrid or online. Everything below adapts in level, length and reading list.
One thing said plainly: my classroom experience comes from facilitation, training and invited lectures, not from a standing faculty appointment. I am looking for my first one, with twenty-six years of university work and a master's in critical theory behind me.
Course catalogue
Contemporary political philosophy
Sovereignty, governmentality and biopolitics: Foucault, Agamben, Preciado, and their critics from the global South.
Undergraduate and postgraduate
Ethics and citizenship · Person and society
Cross-curricular humanities course: situated ethical dilemmas, social responsibility and the construction of the common.
Undergraduate, cross-curricular
Spinoza: ethics, affects and power
The conatus essendi and the theory of the affects as tools for thinking political action and collective care.
Postgraduate and open seminar
Bataille: eroticism, the sacred and expenditure
The erotic world as a dimension of religious life, read alongside cinema and visual culture. The subject of my undergraduate thesis.
Undergraduate and open seminar
Social bioethics and new subjectivities
Body, autonomy and health decision-making beyond the hegemonic biomedical frame.
Postgraduate
Drug policy in Mexico
From the 1961 international control regime to militarised prohibition: institutional design, official metrics, and their blind spots.
Undergraduate and postgraduate
Pharmaco-dissidence and governmentality
A genealogy of prohibition and of the practices that exceed it. Drawn from my master's project.
Postgraduate and open seminar
Cannabis regulation: law, health and subjectivity
Comparative regulatory models and the affirmation of new subjectivities. Based on my chapter published by the UNAM Institute for Legal Research.
Undergraduate and postgraduate
Harm reduction: theory and practice
From the abstentionist to the rights-guaranteeing model. Evidence, human rights and service design.
All levels
Drug checking and community evidence
Colorimetry, spectrometry and the epidemiological intelligence produced by collectives, against the state's own metrics.
Postgraduate and technical training
Gender, sexual dissidence and non-binary identity
Legal frameworks, recognition, and the lived experience of the paperwork. I teach this from the position of someone who litigated it.
All levels
Inclusive education, disability and reasonable accommodation
Universal design for learning and curricular adjustment. I coordinated this training for the Universidad de Guadalajara's faculty.
Faculty development
Urban ethnography and fieldwork
Field design, diaries, interviewing and systematisation. Trained on the CIESAS Atlas of Religious Diversity project.
Undergraduate and postgraduate
Critical cartography
Mapping relations of power, not only territories. The core method of my doctoral research.
Postgraduate
Epistemology of the social sciences
What counts as evidence, who produces it, and with what political consequences.
Undergraduate and postgraduate
Evaluation of social programmes and indicators
Design, monitoring and evaluation. Twenty-six years building the indicators of a multi-campus university.
Postgraduate and continuing education
Governance and health policy analysis
Co-production, collaborative governance and the problem of evidence in public health.
Postgraduate
Modular seminars
Ready to be offered, in the four-or-eight-session format that online critical-education platforms use.
Pharmaco-dissidence and governmentality: genealogies of prohibition
The international control regime, the construction of the addict as a subject, and the practices that exceed it.
8 sessions, one topic each
Body, eroticism and the sacred: Bataille and Spinoza
Two philosophies of excess and of power, read against the contemporary administration of bodies.
8 sessions, one topic each
Playful pedagogies, harm reduction and bodily sovereignty
Theory plus the design of teaching devices. This is where La loterama cannábica came from.
4 sessions
Community evidence and institutional blindness
How official health data is produced, what it leaves out, and how territorial chemical evidence corrects it. From my doctoral research.
4 sessions
Want the full syllabus?
I can send the detailed programme, reading list and assessment plan for any of these.
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