Practices in Community Building Fellowship
What does it take to build community on a pluralistic campus of diverse experiences, backgrounds and perspectives?
When we cannot take common interests or assumptions for granted, what communities can form? Amid the welter of feelings and difference that course through us all, is something we would call friendship possible?
The UCI Deans' Practices in Community Building Fellowship is a cohort of 25 undergraduate students working together over the course of the 2024-25 academic year to explore and build projects that imagine and foster forms of community.
[Political] [f]riendship is not an emotion, but a practice, a set of hard-won, complicated habits that are used to bridge trouble, difficulty, and differences of personality, experience, and aspiration.
Fall Meetings
The cohort of fellows began meeting during the second half of the fall semester, guided by the Deans' Fellowship program lead Professor Jonathon Kahn and Associate Dean Larry Jackson, director of the Center for the Core Curriculum, as well as other faculty who teach in the Core.
Informed by selected readings rooted in the themes of the Core Curriculum, the fall meetings allow the cohort to envision and develop projects that appeal to the fellows’ interests.
Spring Projects
The spring semester will be devoted to bringing the fellows’ projects and experiments in community building to fruition. These projects will be varied and will emerge out of their work together. For example, fellows may want to develop a lecture series about a particular theme, or invite a series of speakers on community service-learning projects. Fellows may undertake projects in oral history and storytelling, or building community through the arts. To all of this, fellows will be pursuing their own passions and interests.
Fellows will enroll in a one-credit course (at no additional cost) in which they will relate their projects to themes from the Core Curriculum.
Description & Exposition
To claim, taking cues from the above quote from Danielle Allen, that building community requires learning practices or habits of engagement frames these questions in a particular way. It insists that communities are forged through embodied efforts and actions. What are the sorts of social practices and social habits — the doings — that help build communities marked by pluralistic cross-pressures? How does one learn these practices and habits? What traditions and examples can we call on?
Fellows joining this cohort of scholars and colleagues should be interested in thinking through the explicit and implicit norms that qualitatively shape community:
- To what degree and how should the pain of others be recognized?
- How important is a “hermeneutics of generosity” in community building, which begins with trying to understand the other’s intentions before judging or criticizing them?
- How does self-criticism and criticism of others function in community?
- How important is dialogue, and of what sorts, to building forms of political friendship? Exchange of ideas— dialogue — may be necessary, but our focus on practice and habits also casts a skeptical eye on the notion that community rests solely or primarily on evaluating the soundness of propositions. History is replete with other social practices — storytelling, song, listening, dance —that carry and convey real discursive value.