Kevin Fuller, Critical Encounters Faculty Fellow: kgfuller@colum.edu
Lott Hill, Associate Director for Civic Engagement: lhill@colum.edu
Critical Encounters is an ongoing series of yearlong college-wide examinations of important social issues that focus, challenge, and complicate the thinking of all members of the Columbia College Chicago community.
Through the curriculum, class work, co-curricular activities, and a variety of public events such as art exhibitions, performances, and multimedia communications, Critical Encounters will enable faculty, students, staff, and the community to voluntarily collaborate toward a more complex understanding of the role and responsibility of the arts and media in shaping public attitudes, opinions, and knowledge.
In the 2008-09 academic year, Critical Encounters: Human|Nature will examine the relationships and tensions between humankind and the natural world. We will consider how factors such as the culture, wealth, geography, and history of societies have influenced humanity’s stewardship, exploitation, understanding, and artistic representations of the natural environment. The initiative will investigate how past actions have resulted in local and global environmental crises and weigh potential solutions. Human|Nature will survey how societies either choose to collectively protect their shared resources or retreat from cooperation and the impact these decisions have had on humanity and human rights. Human| Nature will also gauge the impact of the natural world on human development by considering how nature has shaped the shared human experience as well as exploring the degree to which individual values, qualities, and desires are either naturally imbued or socially nurtured.