2024-25 Living Learning Communities

The following Living Learning Communities (LLC) will be offered for the 2024-25 academic year:

Note: Your placement in a particular LLC is based upon a mix of your submitted interests and personal accommodation needs. We cannot guarantee your placement in a particular course.

Challenges of Sustainability and Resilience

This Living Learning Community explores challenges and opportunities for social innovations that promote greater social, ecological, and economic sustainability. We combine our study of complex and multifaceted 'wicked problems' of the 21st century with hands-on, collaborative learning activities, designed to critically and creatively respond to these challenges while seeking to build community and cultures of resilience in the process.

Creating Monsters (2 Sections)

One becomes a monster either by committing some "monstrous" act or by possessing some properties that designate them as essentially "other." This course examines and evaluates the psychological, sociopolitical, and ethical processes through which this occurs and will attempt to answer the question: What does the status of monsters tell us about what it is to be human?

Democracy and DisInformation

Elections, local and national, allow us to choose the people who will make decisions about our communities and our world. To what extent are we obligated to participate in elections? And how can we participate if we are unable to vote? How should people educate themselves about issues on the ballot? In what ways do media—from newspapers to TikTok—shape our views and beliefs? How do we know which sources to trust? And is democracy really the best system? This course explores these questions and more in the context of the 2024 election.

Human Rights

While most people today profess support for human rights, difficult questions emerge if we press deeper. What, exactly, are the rights that we all share? Are these rights universal or are they specific to certain cultural traditions? How should human rights

violations be prevented? Once such violations have occurred, how should societies pursue justice and promote reconciliation?

Myth and Modern

In the Myth and Modern section of FP, you will read ancient Greek poetry and plays (translated into English!) alongside some of the modern literature, films, and essays that they have inspired. The focus of our discussions and writing assignments will be on the formation of identities; power and oppression; resistance and liberation; and the questions of who the past belongs to and who gets to shape the future. You don't need any prior knowledge to succeed in this class, just a willingness to think deeply, collaborate with others, and challenge yourself. 

Science Fiction and Human Identity

Do humans differ in a fundamental way from thinking machines? What is the relationship of the body to our conception of the human, and how might it change with the advent of genetic or cybernetic augmentation? What is the likely endpoint or destiny of humankind? Science fiction stories can be read as thought experiments designed to explore deep questions about what it means to be human. Drawing on a variety of readings and films, our goal in this course will be to explore the issue of human identity as seen through the lens of science fiction.