Teaching

Class photos from the 2024-25 Academic Year, in collaboration with the Bok Center's Learning Lab.

While I teach within the displine of political theory, I regularly incorporate multi-perspectival practices within my syllabi and treat my classes as communities of inquiry embedded within the relevant broader political communities, both local and transnational. I always welcome pedagogical collaboration with community organizers, activists, and scholars from other disciplines. If you would like to work together with me or simply circulate ideas, feel free to reach me via kyschan@oxy.edu. 

Course Offerings in the 2025-26 Academic Year

Introduction to Political Theory: What is Democracy? [Fall 2025]

“This is what democracy looks like!” But what exactly should democracy look like? This course introduces students to political theory through historical and contemporary debates over democratic visions and challenges. By engaging with political thinkers across space and time, students will not only learn to study politics with interpretive, normative, and critical approaches, but in that process also rethink and expand on their repertoire of democratic practices. The course is divided into three sections. In the first section, we will go through the major schools of democratic theory, concluding with a reflection on whether and why we find democracy to be a good thing. The second section takes us to challenges confronting political communities along the axes of class, race, gender, and colonialism, asking how we might address such challenges democratically. The final section comprises of discussions over how we should live our lives democratically especially in relation to ongoing social movements, transnational politics, and ecological crises. 

Theorizing Membership and Migration [Spring 2026]

Increasingly people are on the move, but not on equal terms. In this class, we will approach contemporary regimes of movement normatively and critically. While our investigations are anchored in political theory, we will draw from other social sciences and read studies ranging from that of ancient Greeks to those about contemporary Tibetans.

The first half of the course centers on questions of membership. We will examine the meaning of citizenship, probe into the various membership categories beyond that of citizenship, interrogate the acquisition rules of these membership categories, and question how rights and obligations are distributed across these categories. We will also explore the possibilities of going beyond the nation state, as promised by the idea of cosmopolitan citizenship.

The second half of the course turns to migration. We will study the debates over whether people should be allowed to migrate across state borders and, relatedly, on what grounds could the state justify their control over borders. We will then attend to the meanings and politics of the categorization of migrants (refugees, asylum seekers, illegal immigrants, economic migrants etc.). Finally, we will ask what rights and obligations migrants have in relation to their home, host, and diasporic communities.

Course Recent Offered in the 2024-25 Academic Year

Exile, Migration, Diaspora [Spring 2025]

In this class, we studied contemporary regimes of movement, explored the diasporic experiences of navigating and resisting these regimes, and reflected upon the broader environment these regimes are embedded in. In that process, students learned to uncover their biases, expand their horizons with perspectives from different positionalities, and incorporate texts of different disciplines, times, and places into their research.

We began by interpreting the narratives of exile across space and time, engaging with exiles ranging from those in ancient Greece to those from contemporary Tibet. Through these narratives, we discussed the implications of statelessness, rethink themes of political membership and belonging, and reflect upon the roles of exiles in transforming democratic and anti-colonial politics. In the second part of the course, we zoomed out from individual exiles and examine migration trends and policies. Drawing on migration studies and political theory, we attended to histories of migrant categorization, emerging practices of bordering, and the politics of immigrant resistance. Thus grounded, we scrutinized the normative grounds for the state to control its territorial and membership boundaries. In the final part of the course, we turned to the theme of diaspora. In dialogue with scholars of sociology and international relations, we will interrogate competing conceptions of diaspora, parse the triangular relations between a diaspora, its “home state”, and its “host state”, and evaluate the promises and challenges of transnationalism as disclosed by diasporic politics.