Peace and Conflict
The Peace and Conflict Pathway explores both how communities, states, and nations thrive – resolving conflict and developing stable infrastructures for governance, artistic expression, education, health, faith traditions, and environmental and economic sustainability – and also how they can fail in these efforts, leaving conflict unresolved and at times resorting to violence, including war. It also examines the long-term consequences for politics, society, economies, technologies, and cultures of these practices of peace and conflict.
Representative animating questions:
- How have communities in eras of peace and conflict chosen to tell their stories, in the visual arts, literature, dance, music, religious texts, and other forms of performance and narration? How can students do so today?
- How have social constructions like race, gender, religion, nationality, and ethnicity bound people together and torn them apart?
- Are human societies becoming more or less violent?
Thematic Inquiry
The current plan is for a single course to be offered every spring term by the Pathway coordinator or another member of the Pathway group. The Pathway group will determine a set of shared goals for the Thematic Inquiry, stressing the importance of the interdisciplinary nature of the class and acknowledging that the students may have quite varied interests. Nevertheless, individual instructors will have the flexibility to design a syllabus of their own within that framework. The class will also include three to five appearances, lectures, or conversations with other Pathway faculty to help orient students to the variety of approaches and courses they can take, advisers they can seek, and the community being created. Furthermore, the course would include at least one important “signature” event per year that would bring the entire Pathway group of faculty and students together. This could be a symposium, outside lecturer, or group community service project. From the beginning of the class, students would know that their goal by the term’s end must include an animating question, a plan for creating a global or local connection, and at least initial ideas about a capstone project.
Required Course
Curricular Itinerary Courses
Global-Local Engagement
Study Away
- SIT South Africa
- SIT Kenya
- SATA Vietnam
- SATA Cuba
- SATA Peru.
Internships
- Roberto Clemente Center, Nicaragua
- NYC centers for immigrant rights/refugees
- Inter-faith Youth Alliance with Connecticut College alumnus, Noah Silverman
- Museum internships at the Submarine Force Library and Museum, at one of the museums in Mystic, or at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center
- The Carter Center: Waging Peace, Battling Disease, Atlanta
- The Martin Luther King, Jr., Center for Nonviolent Social Change, Atlanta
Community-Based Learning
- Course-based work with Eastern Pequot tribal nation
- New London area food pantry
- Centro de la Comunidad
- Vet House, New London Homeless Hospitality Center
- Coordinated work with veterans and military family services with USCGA
Required Course
Senior Reflection
Required Course