Geneva Williams: Can you tell me about yourself and describe a little bit about the types of courses that you teach at the University of Michigan?

Tiffany Ball: I am a part time lecturer at the University of Michigan. That means I usually teach two classes in the fall semester and two classes in the winter semester. I have been doing that since 2021. I got my Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 2016. It was a Ph.D. in English and Women’s Studies. So I have a background in English, specifically British literature as well as feminist thought and LGBTQ studies. 

Since graduating, I spent a year in Kalamazoo as a postdoc, and then I lived in Beijing, China and taught there in the World Institute for Literature and Cultures where I taught modernist literature and a little feminist thought here and there. At Michigan, which is a job I really love, I teach our WGS 330 course which is Feminist Thought. It is the introduction to theory for Gender and Health majors as well as Women and Gender Studies majors and anyone else who wants to take it, but it’s required for those majors.

In this course we take a broad look at feminist thought. Professors all teach it a little differently, we have creative control over how it is taught. I tend to teach it thematically with a little bit of a chronological order. I don’t really teach anything prior to the second wave [in the 1960s], I don’t teach so-called “first wave” feminism. That’s due to time and trying to get in newer information for students to see how feminist thought is being used currently. And to show them how it is very relevant to other topics such as critical race studies, queer studies, etc.  

I also teach the course Leading Feminism, WGS 351 which is our practicum course. That course is where the rubber meets the road. The things you learn in theory you get to apply. That course is structured so students can design a project the length of the term. There are three tracks; you can do a volunteer track, an art track or a policy track. I like to change my classes a little every semester to try and see what works better.

Sometimes I teach Race, Gender and  Nation. I also sometimes teach a freshman seminar on feminist views of work and rest. Recently, I started teaching a seminar which is really grounded in the work that I am doing now as a feminist therapist and social worker which is WGS 313. It’s a seminar on the medical humanities–it’s called Writing from the Wound: Feminist Narratives of Pain Liberation and Healing. That class really focuses on trauma narratives and I get a lot of future medical providers in that class. It’s really cool, I’ve taught it twice and I really enjoy teaching it.

I have been getting my master’s degree in social work, which I just finished in May 2026. I have now started working at a private practice clinic and I’m building my caseload now. I plan to keep doing this two-pronged career.     

Williams: How do you hope to incorporate feminism into your therapy work? 

Ball: One thing is that I see in my social work degree, there was so much overlap with social work and Women and Gender Studies. It’s a social justice degree. We abide by a code of ethics and one of those codes is social justice. There is a big emphasis placed on supporting people and populations; not just to change themselves but to change systems that are harming them. 

We think in terms of a person-in-environment structure. That’s the term we use. It’s not just a person, it’s a person embedded in family, in a community, in a nation, in a world. Thinking that way comes really naturally to me after all these years because that’s how we think in Women and Gender Studies. We think about social structures and systems of power. 

In my practice with individuals, I try to always keep that in mind when I’m working with folks. I try to get people to think about themselves as a member of the world who can make change. We talk a lot about reducing blame. A lot of folks feel a lot of personal blame for things that are happening in their lives. Sometimes I meet women or people of color or queer folks who really feel pained by these systems of power that don’t serve them well. So we work on survival tactics, mechanisms of change and ways of shifting blame from oneself to seeing the world as an unfair system often. I do that at the same time as using interpersonal techniques such as cognitive behavioral or thinking about one’s childhood.

Those dynamics are always involved in the way we think about gender, race, class, ability, etc. So that’s a big way that my background plays a role in my therapy. I also practice as a feminist humanistic therapy which means I don’t do the cliché therapist as a blank state who just listens. I bring myself into sessions, I share when it is useful for clients, I use self disclosure when I think a client could benefit from it. I don’t do it to the extreme because it’s focused on the client.

What I’ve learned from feminist teaching, when I bring parts of myself into the classroom, the classroom changes. It becomes a more intimate space. Students are encouraged to share what they are thinking and feeling, it creates a community. When you are working in therapy you are creating a community of two. You have to give a little and show people, I think, that they can trust you with their intimacy and that you are also a full person who has done this work and that you have suffered. A lot of my therapeutic knowledge comes from my own experience of suffering, my own experience in therapy. 

Williams: When I took your WGS 351: Leading Feminism course, you often talked about the importance of utilizing community partnerships. How is utilization of community partnerships an exercise of feminist praxis to you?

Ball: I think it is so important in a university setting when we are teaching students, and teaching at the University of Michigan I am very lucky because we have a lot of resources. Students often come from privileged backgrounds on their own. I’m not saying they don’t have hardships or experience marginalization. A lot of my students come from places in the world that enabled them to get to the University of Michigan which is not an easy school to get into. One of the things that I found in working with community partnerships is that students get the opportunity to learn in the ways you don’t always get at a prestigious university where a lot of faculty have been in academia their whole lives. This is a way for folks to see alternative paths–ways to get to a degree, ways to contribute to society outside the university setting. I also think it’s a great opportunity for students to learn humility, ways for them to learn that systems of power can also involve care. And that care and coercion have a relationship together, a history or an intimacy if you will. I think it’s so important for students to get exposed to that in a university; which is to enable students to do service oriented work. We don’t actually use that term anymore–service oriented–we use community partnership because you don’t want to be like, “hello, we’re the University of Michigan and we’re here to help you.” It’s a two way street. 

You can never have an equal balance of power, that’s my thought about that, but you can have a better balance of power. You can be self aware about how power operates. That’s why it’s so important to do that kind of work. I think it’s so important now for my feminist praxis to see local impact. We are living in a time where big scale change is happening but not necessarily in the ways feminists want so it’s good to see local change. It’s good to see communities are doing things and people are still showing up even in difficult times.

Williams: If you were offered our WAPUSH course back when you were in high school what are some key concepts or themes that you would have benefited from? Additionally, who are some feminist scholars that you teach that you feel would be a good introduction for high school students?

Ball: I grew up in Georgia in a public school system where my biology teacher told us she wasn’t going to teach us the theory of evolution because she got too many complaints. So in thinking about myself as 16, 17 or 18, I think learning nearly anything about this at that time would have rocked my world. One thing students could get from this experience and a theme I think would be helpful for students would be to think about how there has always been conflict in feminism. That feminists have always had productive dialogue and disagreement. 

A lot of students who take my course at Michigan have a singular notion of feminism or they want feminism to be singular. They want to look for a coherent narrative. It’s just not that and I wouldn’t want it to be that. That’s not the messy practice of social justice. A lot of students come to class thinking it’s about equality. But equality is a liberal feminist concept. Getting access to an equality narrative is important but also getting access to a justice narrative or socialist feminists who were taking an economic or Marxist analysis of work. That would be a helpful thing for students to get. And beyond the key players model. 

I understand why it’s often taught that way. It’s compelling, it arguably might make it more accessible to teach it that way to young folks. But trying to get at collectives would be a very hopeful way of framing this. 

Williams: In any of your work, have you come across American women that you think would be important to cover in this course?

Ball: bell hooks and Audre Lorde are great feminist thinkers that would be accessible to high school students. They are superstars in the feminist world so I imagine students are seeing their work referenced on social media. Contemporary folks would be good, I teach a lot of adrienne maree brown is an interesting person that is very accessible to undergrads.

I often think in terms of theory rather than history because my dissertation work was based in the UK since I was doing British literature primarily. I remember reading Emma Goldman when I was an undergrad and her comparison of sex work to marriage. That blew my mind, maybe it would for students now. 

I’m trying to imagine teaching Shulamith Firestone to high school students. I enjoy reading her work. There’s a book called The Dialectic of Sex, and it’s so fascinating for encompassing a vision of a feminist society and what it would look like at a social level. Sometimes I teach it in feminist thought. It always brings up a lot of emotion and a lot of debate. One of the key arguments Firestone makes is that reproduction has to move outside of the body. So it has a sci-fi aspect to it that’s fascinating. People don’t read her much anymore, I think it is in part because people think of her work as biologically essentialist in a way. But I do think there is stuff to offer there still. 

Do you have anything on the wages for the housework movement? 

Williams: I’d have to look. I can send you the link if you want to look through it. 

Ball: There’s a lot of interesting information about that. You should also look into the Global Feminism project at Michigan. There are a lot of helpful interviews on that website.

I have one final question. Do you support the creation of an AP Women’s U.S. History course? If so could you share why you support it?

Ball: Totally! I think it would be amazing. I would love that for students, I would have loved that for myself. Now is the time to get these kinds of messages out there to give students these opportunities to learn about topics and thinkers who are pushing against the grain and against mainstream ideas. 

That’s what I think liberal education is about; it’s about exposing people to ideas they wouldn’t hear otherwise. I also think it would be great for young women, LGBQ folks, non-binary kids in a way to think in ways I myself did not have the opportunity to when I was a teen. I hope it comes to fruition.