2025-26 Living Learning Communities

The following Living Learning Communities (LLC) will be offered for this 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 to 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

This course analyzes monsters found in film and literature from around the world using theories from a variety of disciplines, specifically anthropology, sociology, philosophy, neuroscience, biology, and psychology. We will ask what these horrific entities reveal about the culture in which they dwell, and, ultimately, what monsters tell us about ourselves and what it means to be human.

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?

Performance Studies

In this class you’ll be introduced to Performance Studies, a field that holds that all human behavior can be viewed as performance, from brushing your teeth to flirting to performing a violin solo. We’ll examine and analyze various types of performance, while answering such questions as: What does it mean to “perform” oneself? How do we shape others’ visions of us through our social media activities? What do we mean when we say that someone is a “performative” activist? What rituals do we perform, on a daily basis and on special occasions, and what purpose do they serve? 

The Power of Place (2 Sections)

From the original inhabitants of the land to the most recent immigrants, from families that have lived in the same spot generation after generation to people who move frequently for work or personal reasons, our experiences create a tangled web of connections to place and our sense of ourselves. Every day, we tell ourselves stories about who we are in order to help us make sense of the world. These stories all come from somewhere—our family, the places where we’ve lived, the communities to which we’ve belonged. They help us understand what makes each of us uniquely ourselves. This class leads students to explore the role of place in defining identity and to craft a new understanding of themselves and their relationship to place.

What is a Citizen

The word, “citizen” has a fairly static dictionary meaning. In the real world, though, it is a complex concept. It has been used to inspire for good and for ill, to exclude, and as justification for all manner of civic actions. Public schools in the U.S., as governmental institutions, are expected to develop ‘good’ citizens. What does that mean? How have schools approached that task? And, how do those approaches relate to the broader ideas of what it means to be a citizen, particularly in an era when the "rights" of citizens are being questioned at all levels of government?