NEH Enduring Questions Course on Political Community

FAIN: AQ-248179-16

University of Minnesota (Minneapolis, MN 55455-2009)
Nancy Luxon (Project Director: September 2015 to March 2021)
Robert B. Nichols (Co Project Director: June 2016 to March 2021)

The development and teaching of a new writing intensive, lower-division course for undergraduates on the making of political community.

What Makes Political Community? We will explore different ways to think political community. Many contemporary political challenges are not just thorny problems but transform the very institutions, engagements, and concepts through which we understand what the activity of politics is and might be. Other societies and thinkers have faced drastically new challenges to their politics. So, we propose a course that would explore how political actors make and remake community. Our first unit, Polis and Empire, turns to the ancient world to reexamine the scope of politics, as it experimented with small city-states and large empires. Second, Colonial Encounters will analyze the movements of ideas, trades, and people back and forth across the Atlantic. Third, Revolution Reimagined treats incendiary moments of cultural and political contact. This course speaks to humanist concerns of how humans forge meanings and communities even from conditions of injustice and inequality.