[Current] 02 *NEW* Community/Communities - Fall 2025
Class Number:
770-01
INSTRUCTOR:
TIME:
Mondays, 2-4:30 PM
LOCATION:
Hybrid: Online and on campus at GLS House, 2114 Campus Drive
Description:
In this class we’ll examine community and communities. Together we’ll explore questions like: How does community make us? How do communities produce relations and manufacture worlds? How do our communities shape what we understand as truth, knowledge, and identity? How are ideas and ideologies built into communities, and how do those manifest in collective output? How does community—imagined, actual, or otherwise—impact bodies, boundaries, borders, and belonging? What does it mean to be in community with each other, and with other communities?
In true liberal studies style, we’ll take a methodological walk through an interdisciplinary landscape: we’ll read about The Commons and communities of care; we’ll speak with experts about intentional and temporary communities; we’ll entertain notions of Collective Intelligence and Common Wisdom; we’ll look at digital communities and platformed relationality; and we’ll investigate the role of physical and digital infrastructure in making and maintaining communities.
We’ll even engage nonhuman communities—starlings moving together in murmurations, trees communicating via underground networks, the teeming life of soil—as provocations that might influence how we think about togetherness and about our human place in the world. We might also consider community compacts, gift economies, citizenship, social movements, and/or compassionate systems-building.
Ultimately we’ll ask how human, nonhuman, technological, and planetary communities come together to create the world as we know it. At its core, this class is about how we experience the world, together. And it takes seriously the belief that the world is, collectively, constructed by the communities we make.