For academic year 2024-2025.
The stories we hear, tell, and see are crucial to our constructions of self and others. Narratives reflect, shape and reinforce notions of self, other and community. The theme of the Self Cluster this year will be “Self and Other in Conversation.” Each of us experiences the world as a being who is embodied, self-aware, reflective, and connected with others. This being, this “self,” must make choices about how to live. In making these choices, we face many challenges, both individually and collectively — including challenges that are political, cultural, psychological, ethical, environmental, biological and existential. What understandings of health, happiness, and a good life do we draw upon when making such choices? How does the self find meaning and purpose as it navigates interwoven and often conflicting sources and modes of identity and expression? In what ways do rapidly evolving technologies enable, complicate, or undermine these processes of self-formation and authentic connection across multiple physical and imagined landscapes of community, meaning, and value?