First-Year Flourishing Seminars

What if instead of thinking about fairytales in folkloristic terms and as quaint objects from a distant past, we were engaging critically with their strange pedagogies of flourishing? To achieve this goal, this class, we will reconnect early modern storytelling practices with the work of contemporary artists and disability activists engaged in the redefinition of the good life.

Human beings are storytellers – whether of great myths and legends, heart wrenching dramas or heartwarming comedies, we all tell stories all the time. Stories connect us, transform us, and allow us to express our deepest understanding of ourselves and the world we live in. In this seminar, we will explore the world of stories – stories we tell about ourselves, stories we listen to told by the people around us, and stories we are surrounded by in our culture -- novels, movies and even tweets. Through scholarly reading and group research projects, we will learn what stories are and what they mean, how stories bring people together and tear them apart, and how we can all become more effective communicators by learning to tell our story.

Interested in optimizing your study techniques? Maybe you have heard about Memory Palaces, but never understood how to use them or the science behind them? This course will cover the history of learning & memory principles, reviewing primary papers drawn from the fields of Neuroscience, Cognition, and Pedagogy. The primary focus will be on the practical implementation of these evidence-based principles, and is designed to jump start your academic career, and is part of the “Flourishing Initiative”.

What do you require to flourish, to live a good life, one that is rich in meaning and praiseworthy in character? Is luck a factor? Are friendships required? What forces undermine human flourishing? Do all people have equal prospects for flourishing, or are those prospects subject to histories of class, gender, race, and their intersections? How does your flourishing relate to the flourishing of others, including the more than human world? We will explore these and other questions through a range of thought-provoking texts ranging from the likes of Aristotle, Beauvoir, Du Bois, and others.

During the semester students will explore what it means to imagine opportunities to create Just Cities. We will explore existing inequities in the United States and social justice policies and programs in areas of health, climate change, education, food systems, the criminal legal system, housing, economics, and the environment. We will combine research and discussion of social justice with reading by James Baldwin and exercises in imagining using the participatory poetry of Yoko Ono.

Suffering is a universal feature of human life. No one who lives does not also suffer. This insight is the starting point for the Buddha’s teachings on the nature of the human condition and the possibility of human flourishing. Although suffering is universal, diverse causes of suffering can be identified. Once identified, these causes can be ameliorated so that the suffering they produce is either less harmful or even eliminated. This course is an introduction to traditional and contemporary Buddhist theories of well-being, happiness, and flourishing, along with some of the methods designed to bring these about.

“Systemic Racism” has become one of the most salient, polarizing, misunderstood, nuanced, definitionally amorphous, yet consequential phrases in academic, political, and lay spaces. Although economic dynamics are central to some of the key ideas behind systemic racism, the notion of systemic racism has barely permeated the field of economics. In this course we will 1) Investigate the limitations behind traditional approaches to study racial discrimination within the field of economics; 2) Draw on literature from multiple disciplines to establish a working definition of systemic racism; 3) Explore both the history of anti-Black racism in the United States and the economic consequences of that history; and 4) Consider how an economically rigorous understanding of systemic racism could lead to pragmatic policy solutions to racial inequities. Attention will be given to heterogeneity in the social and economic well-being of various Black subgroups by gender and sexuality (e.g., intersectional experiences of Black women in career mobility). Students will learn how respectful, empathetic, scholarly, but also historically informed conversations about race can lead to productive solutions.

The well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman Life on Earth have value in themselves (synonyms: intrinsic value, inherent value). These values are independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for human purposes.

What place does the nonhuman or “more-than-human” world hold in the project of human flourishing? If the term “flourishing” is derived from the Latin term flos (“flower”), then does human flourishing already entail a kind of nonhuman flourishing? How is flourishing different from surviving, languishing, or “merely” existing? This course will consider nonhuman flourishing by tracing the historical emergence of the contemporary ecological or environmental movement. We will read some of the most important texts that galvanized this movement from the late nineteenth century to the present including Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and selected essays by John Muir and Arne Naess. Students also will have the opportunity to present their own work on current ecological issues in our class.

Philosophy, the arts, and criticism come together in this course that traces the history of artistic thinking from the early Greeks, to the naughty Europeans, to our current artistic climate. Students will create, perform, produce, examine, and begin to define their own aesthetics by taking in as much art and culture as one can in a semester! Of critical importance is the ability and desire to openly discuss ideas, debate opinions and become comfortable with being uncomfortable. Guest lectures, abstract thinking, and a journey into unfamiliar arts-driven territory will define the class. Students will also gain hands-on experience with varied artistic genres, including music, theater, visual arts, and dance.

What sort of person should I strive to be? What kind of life should I cultivate and live? How can my life not simply escape major ills but genuinely flourish—how can it be a life full of happiness, value, achievement, and meaning? These are questions that every person faces.

This seminar will address these questions through three central issues:

1. What is human well-being? What is a flourishing life and how does one lead one?
2. Can flourishing be measured? If so, how? Or is it somehow too individual or too qualitative to allow for any quantitative analysis? If flourishing cannot be measured, are there other ways to recognize it and nurture it? What are they?
3. What is the relation between individual flourishing and societal or cultural flourishing? Are they connected? If so, how? To what extent, if at all, are the well-being of others, the sustainability of a community and its environment, and social justice key components of flourishing?