A thematic cluster is a group of 3-4 non-sequential courses concerned with a single topic of contemporary and enduring significance. Collaboratively designed and independently taught by both full-time University Honors faculty and University of Maryland faculty drawn from across the university’s academic colleges and schools, each course in a cluster explores the theme from a different disciplinary perspective.
Clusters are comprised of a Big Question course and 2-3 satellite seminars. To complete a cluster, students must complete the I-series course (3 credits) and one of the satellite seminars (3 credits), for a total of 6 credits. Courses may be completed in any order and at any time during the cluster’s two-year lifespan.
Each academic year, one set of four thematic clusters is retired, while a new set of four thematic clusters is introduced.
Biodiversity is the astonishing variety of life across ecosystems—from estuaries at the crossroads of freshwater and saltwater to working landscapes and seascapes like farms and fisheries. But why is biodiversity essential? And why should we care that it is increasingly under threat locally and globally? This cluster explores these questions and more, examining how diverse ways of knowing—including Western scientific frameworks and others including Indigenous Ecological Knowledges—shape our understanding of biodiversity and interconnected life. We will discover how conservation strategies shift across contexts through cultural, ecological, and philosophical lenses, fostering an inclusive, adaptable approach to sustaining ecosystems and all life on the planet.
What happens to your identity when you are displaced? How do migrants use literature, film, art, and culture to gain insights into their lives and create themselves anew? This cluster invites students to understand immigration through the larger processes that structure people’s lives, like state-making, laws and the economy, politics, history and memory, wars, and climate change. Courses explore how artistic production can influence social change, how people write and film to document immigration for themselves and their communities, how diasporas are transforming our world, and the cultural processes through which territories are made into homelands. Drawing on a variety of disciplines and diasporic Black, Indigenous, Asian, and Latinx cultures, students in this cluster will learn about immigrant communities in the United States and Europe, and their connections to other parts of the world. They will be poised to understand the often insurmountable barriers that migrants navigate in a challenging, globalized, and hostile world and also to challenge the forces through which that world came to be and persist.
Nobel laureate Toni Morrison once said that challenging times spark writers and artists to get to work to help civilizations heal. How do the arts and media reflect, reproduce, and challenge the ways we see the world? How do they unite and embolden communities facing grand challenges? In this cluster, we will explore the power of art and media to communicate unique perspectives that enrich, enlighten, and engage our communities. These classes will enable students to make unexpected connections with other peoples, cultures, and societies. Students will embark on a journey to understand themselves so they can transform and positively impact the world. This cluster offers students opportunities to become graphic witnesses of socio-cultural phenomena while providing tools to inspire hope and possibility.
Public health might seem to be a matter of science and biology, but this cluster will explore how those seemingly objective forces are shaped by underlying social biases and political motivations. How do our concepts and structures of race, womanhood, and other socio-economic categories influence the public’s health and well-being, and even our health practices? What if we need social change as much as medicine to feel better? How might different social paradigms improve the way we prevent and cure health problems? This cluster examines how sociopolitical and scientific forces collide and percolate discussion, foment debate and disagreement, oppress and exploit, and ultimately determine health policies, laws, and practices. By examining how these forces shape the way we talk about health and the policies that govern it, we will be more prepared to take part in discussions and social change that save lives and improve the public’s health.
We have long understood Artificial Intelligence (AI) to be the ability of machines to emulate, even surpass human intelligence, and take on an increasing amount of the work traditionally done by humans. Yet, AI’s expansive advancement today threatens to result in a displacement of labor comparable in magnitude to the changes instigated by the Industrial Revolution, shifting the nature of work from thinking skills to emotional intelligence. In that world, interpersonal (soft) skills will be paramount. How will we survive and thrive in an AI-dominated world? This cluster turns to science fiction’s intuitions for advance warning about the implications of AI, explores the way politics will manage deep fakes and algorithmic bias, and invites students to question whether intelligence needs to be biological to support human life.
How do our actions reverberate in an unpredictable world? The insight at the heart of the so-called ‘butterfly effect’ is that decisions made in one place can produce unintended consequences felt far away. This cluster invites students to test the theory of the butterfly effect. How, for instance, did ripples from the American Revolution affect the world (and vice versa)? How did plants contribute to the great injustices of colonial empires that continue to plague us today? How has investigative neighborhood reporting transformed what we know? How do global markets interact with local prosperity and inequality? Drawing on insights from diverse disciplines, students in this cluster will gain the tools to better understand how small actions can have large impacts in our ever more inter-connected world.
Human survival depends upon the ability to imagine a future that does not exist. Yet, experience constrains our expectations and what we believe is possible and desirable. If what we know grounds our perception of the natural world, how do we think our way to the world we hope to live in? And how is scientific investigation informed, for better or for worse, by the cultural stories that we tell? This cluster explores past and present imaginative possibilities, from materials to the environment and from medicalized to racialized identities. It interrogates how science both expands and limits what we can imagine, and how imagining has long fed the scientific pursuits that show us the futures we want.
Surveillance is ubiquitous in human society. Various actors and institutions surveil populations, social institutions, and the environment. Surveillance, in turn, shapes identities, social categories, and environmental policy. What are the effects of these practices on us and on the world? Through an exploration of its relationships to the self, popular culture, biodiversity, and more, this cluster examines the productive and problematic aspects of contemporary surveillance. Courses take up the potential costs of surveillance in terms of the individual, social inequalities, and ethical dilemmas within systems of surveillance themselves. Students will reckon with the ubiquity of surveillance in our society and the challenges it poses to present and future social relationships, structures, and institutions.
What are the fundamental rights and responsibilities of choosing to live in community with other humans? How do human communities collaborate to solve shared problems, and what are the consequences when they fail to do so? Looking to examples across time and around the globe, this cluster considers how communities have adapted to natural, industrial, and economic changes. The courses in this cluster identify examples of community resilience in the face of wars, plagues, and other unrest, as well as occasions when communities have ignored challenges, avoided responsibility, and scapegoated others. Together they seek to understand how to maximize civil bonds and minimize destructive habits of individualism.
How do entities of all kinds—from people and processes to artifacts and ideas—achieve their full potential? How is this development affected by their environments? And what are the enduring effects of early exposure on development? From patterns of emergence that are common across species and transitions in behavior that happen over millennia, to the ways that identity is remade through migration and the lifelong effects of early poverty, the behaviors of complex organisms are shaped by social needs and community concerns. This cluster examines the mechanisms and conditions of natural growth patterns to explore the many ways these metamorphoses are enabled—and imperiled—by the forces around them.
As we chart innovative pathways to the future, does the past matter? And what are our present obligations to it? The idea of “heritage” is a bundle of contrasts and contradictions. It is as much about the present and future as it is about the past. What we think of as our collective heritage is invested with intensely personal and emotional connection, while also being highly managed by authorities and governments, and disciplined within legal and economic regimes. This cluster interrogates the ways in which we fashion, forsake, and mobilize our histories. Courses explore the way material, natural, and cultural heritage celebrates past traditions, reckons with historical injustices and atrocities, and helps us chart our future.
What is health in an unhealthy world? What is the role of restorative justice in individual and collective well-being? Social inequalities including race, class and gender fundamentally shape physical and mental health outcomes. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the existing health disparities in the United States and globally. This cluster takes up these systemic challenges to health and well-being, from social inequality and access, to social justice and the racism that persists in our medical institutions. Drawing on expertise from sociology, counseling psychology, family law, and performance studies, the courses in this cluster help students grapple with global debates around reproduction, mental health, coping with sexual violence, medical ethics, and the specific health needs of college students.
What is freedom? How have people repurposed the language or liberty for protest or weaponized it to achieve their goals? How does freedom shape belonging and community development? From the ways incarcerated people build a sense of freedom for themselves to the ways transnational feminists theorize and practice it; and from the 19-century experience of freedom to the ways African Americans have moved through natural landscapes across American history, this cluster explores the ways people imagine, seek, and construct freedom.
What is at stake as humans seek to redesign life? Biotechnology innovations have far-reaching consequences for medicine, agriculture, the environment, and energy. In ways that we can only imagine, and perhaps should fear, these consequences will reshape our planet and others we might explore. This cluster explores the thorny questions of who will be able to use the new technology and where, and who decides. What can we learn from the legacy of eugenics and its role in addressing scientific and societal barriers? What ethical questions arise as we confront what it means to be human? And beyond existence on earth, what lessons must we consider in our encounters with other forms of life?
What explains the stubborn persistence of racism in our institutions, and how should it be confronted? Through an examination of racism in public life – from the films we watch, the books we read, the laws we make, the views we share, and the places we gather together to live and work, this cluster investigates the insidious ability of racist systems to thwart efforts aimed at dismantling inequality. Although the issue of systemic racism looms large, this cluster helps students to understand their role in working toward change.
How do we perceive, react to, and work together to solve the global crises facing us? This cluster proposes a broad approach to understanding the ways that overlapping crises affect society, as well as individuals, and explores ways we might begin to address them. Focusing on climate change, food security, and loneliness, the cluster takes up widespread environmental problems that currently challenge our ability to see the way forward. Students will be exposed to new technologies and approaches, and will consider and evaluate how various perspectives may offer a path to a sustainable future.
In virtually every industry and every corner of culture—from science, government, entertainment, and criminal justice to health care, transportation, social media, and the environment—data management confers enormous power. Its keepers and interpreters can share it transparently or manipulate it; use it to answer pressing questions or weaponize it to oppress; invade personal privacy or maximize the public good. This cluster takes up the complex, often fraught relationship between information and power.
Some bodies enjoy rights and liberties, while others do not. What are the social and natural rules that govern relationships among bodies? Who decides which bodies are sellable, healthy, worthy of reproduction, or entitled to privilege? What happens to these negotiations when one party does not, or cannot, consent to the negotiated rules? This cluster explores the traditions, laws, racial tensions, sex/gender hierarchies, ethical considerations, and evolutionary contexts that have shaped and informed the concept of agency.
We are bombarded daily with more knowledge and perspectives—more words—than we can possibly absorb. The stakes are only higher in a crisis, as we turn to the media for answers and to the arts for alternative modes of communication and expression. What sorts of cognitive acrobatics enable us to understand language? How ought we evaluate the competing claims of science? How do we construct or identify truths amidst widespread disagreement? This cluster asks what it means to be responsibly literate when we’re adrift in a sea of words.
Being human may involve exhibiting and/or performing traits that distinguish us from other kinds of beings. But debates about the moral and legal significance of our humanity—and even about who among us fully qualifies as human—have raged for centuries. Institutions, theorists, and communities have introduced exclusionary definitions aimed at denying agency and social and political standing to broad swaths of the population. This cluster explores what it means to assert and perform our humanity in all the ways we appear and in all the environments we inhabit.
Our modern world is in great part the product of revolution—of sudden and sharp political changes, of dramatic transformations and turn-arounds in scientific and humanistic understanding, and of abrupt paradigm shifts in collective values, standards, and norms. This cluster interrogates the concept and practice of revolution from several different disciplinary perspectives with special attention to causes and consequences and to popularization and push-back.
This cluster explores the phenomena of war and peace at the local, national, and international levels. It examines these concepts to address what we mean by “war” and “peace” and how they relate to one another. In addition, the cluster examines, from a range of disciplinary perspectives, why wars happen, how they develop, and how they affect individuals and societies.
Privately, we ponder important decisions, like where to attend college and what kind of life we’d like to lead. Publicly, our commitment to democracy requires that we engage in debate and civic dialogue about the important issues of the day. In this cluster, students will have the opportunity to learn about the importance of language and rhetorical strategies in public deliberation as well as about what is known about how human beings make judgments and decisions, and how some important decisions in history advanced the ends of social justice and others led to some very bad consequences.
Each human being lies at the intersection of any number of vectors—race, gender, socio-economic status, nationality, age, ability, etc. The effects of these and related factors on our well-being and experience are complicated and profound. In this cluster, students have the opportunity to learn about structures of power that affect individual and group identities, social status, and choices; about how different disciplines research these intersections; and about how our identities are informed by and constructedin social media.