Cluster Themes

Humans are playful creatures.  Studies have confirmed that play is hard-wired in the human animal; we share with other mammals the propensity to explore our surroundings and interact with others in ways that exceed the immediate needs of life.  Chasing, rough and tumble, hide and seek – not only do we observe these playful expressions of our pets, we enjoy them!  Play, Johan Huizinga tells us, precedes culture and is a vital basis of human civilization.  So many of our activities have the word play at its source – sports, theater, religion, and gamification.  Play embodies opposites - you can play with someone or you can be played.  And, it seems that our work-obsessed culture has made us desperate to play!   

The Honors theme for the coming year is Play and civilization: History, theory, practice.  We are looking for seminars that are intellectually adventurous, try new pedagogies, and are able to generate a space for mutual learning that is playful.    

Suggested topics may include:

• Play and human evolution
• Play across species
• Philosophies and modes of play across history
• Education and the impulse to play
• Play, alienated labor, and the arts
• Gamification and contemporary life
• Most importantly, your own take on play from your disciplinary perspective

A human being is part of the whole called “universe,” a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts, and our feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. The true value of a human being is determined by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self.

-Albert Einstein

I don't know anything with certainty, but seeing the stars makes me dream.

- Vincent van Gogh

For our theme this year, the University Honors Program is exploring the relationship between culture and the cosmos, the cultural imagination of the universe and the specific histories and forms of knowledge that give it birth.  As we prepare for the total solar eclipse in April 2024, the theme has a special significance for us locally.  Yet, there is a long history of humans imagining our relationship with those far in space and those in close proximity, such as other forms of life on our own planet.  Imagining the cosmos is as much an exercise in science and technological invention as it in world-making and artistic creation.  We can ask two fundamental questions. One, who is the “we” who is being constructed in considering the relationship with the cosmos?  And, two, how have technological and scientific forays in transforming the human relationship with the cosmos also altered the social and political organization of society?

We invite all SIUC faculty to propose UHON seminars that interpret this theme from a range of perspectives and approaches. Possible topics/questions may include, but are not limited to:

• Space science and science fiction:  how do they enrich/challenge each other? 
• Technological inventions and space travel
• How have astronomers, researchers, and scientists described the impact of studying space? For example, Carl Sagan writes that the study of astronomy is a humbling experience, that it builds character. 
• How is space travel tied to utopian or dystopian ideas about the future of life on earth?  For example, terms like space colony imply a dominating relationship, not only with inhabitants but also land, including space. 
• The futurist imagination
• Historical and philosophical enquiries into the human relationship with the universe; the concept of historical and deep time; and the expression of the planetary imagination in myths, legends, religious, and spiritual histories.
• Artistic expressions and explorations of the cosmic imagination.

We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves.

I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography - to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience.

― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

The Honors theme for this year takes up the concepts of migration and borders to understand the nature of boundaries and their ramifications (whether essential, forced or undertaken willingly).  If there is anything we have learned from the past year and a half of the global pandemic, it is that borders are fluid. 

 As always, we are looking for seminars that push disciplinary boundaries, explore ways of teaching and learning, and build strong foundations for students to take through their university education.  Possible topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Migration of humans fleeing war, climate crisis, economic instability or brutality (contemporary and historical).
• Borders/migrations through life spans and subjectivities--Childhood/adulthood, the past and future, self and other.
• Migration of species (including yearly migration, or due to climate change or loss of habitat)
• Crossing boundaries across species, as with viruses.
• Migration of matter, for example micro plastics into water, soil, and food systems; the change of energy from one form to another
• State/national policing of borders and resistance to it 
• Refugees, statelessness, and internationalism

This year’s Honors theme is inspired by the heightened sense of urgency, worldwide, that the human relationship with the environment is in a state of breakdown and needs immediate attention. 2019 marked the end of the hottest decade on record. The United Nations intergovernmental panel on climate change reported in 2018 that the world had already warmed by 1 degree Celsius and could exceed the precarious 1.5-degree threshold over pre-industrial temperatures as soon as 2030. Given that each decade since the 1980s has been hotter than the previous, we may well consider 2019 to be the end of the coolest decade yet to come – unless we reverse the path that has brought us here. 

In August 2019, Iceland held a funeral for the Okjökull glacier, marking its absence with a letter to the future inscribed on a plaque:

In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.

The phrase, Cradle to Cradle, comes to us from Sustainability Studies, most notably in William McDonough and Michael Braungart’s book, Cradle to Cradle:  Remaking the Way We Make Things (2002).  They propose that human creativity and ingenuity must be turned away from the logic of “Cradle to Grave” that has dominated the last two hundred years of industrial production. It must be replaced, they suggest, by ways of living that mimic the regenerative cycles of nature.  In other words, instead of producing with planned obsolescence inbuilt into it, we must create such that the end of life is the beginning of a new cycle.  

In this cluster, we seek to expand this concept beyond cycles of production and consumption to encompass all areas of life; to explore what regenerative thinking and living mean from the multiple disciplines and approaches.