In partnership with the Wellin Museum, the Levitt Center invites students to apply to this Spring 2026 Justice Lab. The Lab is a semester-long opportunity for students to take a set of parallel courses that combine mutually reinforcing academic and experiential learning around the broad theme of justice. All the instructors in the Lab work together to coordinate syllabi and assignments and to provide students in the Lab with an integrated, interdisciplinary understanding of the topic.
For this Justice Lab, Profs. Jaime Kucinskas, Charlotte Botha, and Vincent Odamtten will teach three connected courses in which students will study the relationship between creativity, community, justice and imagining new futures through different disciplines, media and arts. We will be in conversation with exhibiting artists from the Wellin Museum and others in the art community, musicians, authors, and community organizers.
Creative expression, community engagement, and experiential learning are at the heart of the pedagogy for this justice lab. Botha will guide students through the transfer of music concepts from pre-colonial Western Africa to contemporary African-American culture as a means of creative expression, innovation, and communal resilience. Kucinskas will offer an experiential course on the sociology of creativity, museums, collective action, and imagining new futures. Odamtten’s course will explore selected texts from the 19th to the 21st centuries that engage haunting memories, dreams, and the desire for more just futures.
There are no prerequisites for any of these courses. The Justice Lab courses meet during regularly scheduled course times which means that student-athletes will be able to get to practice, and students can work out schedules for on-campus jobs.
You can find a description of the Justice Lab courses below. If you have questions about the Lab please email us at levitt@hamilton.edu and you can contact the professors directly as well. Please note that the Justice Lab will involve several field trips and regular trips into the local community and an optional opportunity for a trip. You can find the course schedule here.
SOC-320 Creative Community, Movement and Imagining New Futures
Grounded in the sociology of creativity, this course will examine different ways of understanding and engaging in collective creativity and imagining new ways of being and futures in a moment when the world is facing polycrises, and rapid political and economic change. This course was inspired by and will be embedded in the Wellin museum’s current exhibit “Another World, and Yet the Same,” created by Jamea Richmond Edwards. In particular, we will explore sociological theory on creativity and collective action, consider the different social capacities of museums, and deliberate on how college campuses can be institutional engines of creativity and imagining new ways of being together. We will also experiment and play with collective movement, creative works, and collective action. Jaime Kucinskas
MUSIC/AFRST-114 Black Voices in Song
Explores the musical styles and cultural contexts of the vocal music of selected Black composers, arrangers, songwriters, and performers. Works include the Renaissance motets of Vincente Lusitano, cantatas of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, African-American spirituals, gospel music, Motown Records' greatest hits, protest songs, non-idiomatic choral repertoire, and the music of artists such as Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, Whitney Houston, Beyoncé, Janelle Monáe and Kendrick Lamar. Topics include appropriation, identity, power, race, reception, religion, representation, style, and tokenism. While students are not required to read Western music notation, technical knowledge and methodical analysis of music concepts in audio and video material will be studied and applied. Charlotte Botha
LIT-TBD Haunting Memories, Dreaming Social Justice and Afrofuturism
The course will explore selected texts from the 19th to the 21st centuries that engage with haunting memories, dreams, and the desire for more just futures. Students will be encouraged to creatively critique how authors and artists address issues of access to resources, equity, participation, diversity, and human rights in the real and imagined worlds they depict. The variety of texts ranges from appeals such as David Walker’s, Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of His Life, and The Heroic Slave, the documentary report Southern Horrors and The Red Record, Imperium In Imperio, George S. Schuyler’s satire Black No More, poetry such as Zong! by NourbeSe Philips, fiction by Samuel R Delaney, Octavia Butler, N. K. Jemisin, and Janelle Monae. Vincent Odamtten
Enrollment in the program is limited. Applications to the Justice Lab are open to all students.
Please fill out the following application form. Upon clicking "Apply Now", you will be prompted to create a free account with Interfolio. If you already have an Interfolio account, you should sign in. If you don't already have an Interfolio account, click on the "Sign up" button (NOT the "sign in through partner institution link). Applications are due November 4th.
