Courses for Foundations Week.

Foundations: Vassar Immersion in the Liberal Arts

In an effort to support students of the incoming class the FLI program, in partnership with Engaged Pluralism, hosts Foundations Week. The pre-orientation was established in 2010 as a three-day program and is now a week-long. 

Foundations seeks to maximize your success and comfort at Vassar by:

  • Discussing academic expectations and realities before beginning the regular school year;
  • Providing a personalized overview of the campus, its resources, and its support opportunities;
  • Facilitating networking and mentoring relationships with peers, professors, and administrators;
  • Fostering community ties and relationships.

FLI Foundations 01 - College Belonging

Feeling like we belong in the spaces that we navigate is of crucial importance for our holistic wellbeing and our ability to thrive and succeed in those spaces - and college is no exception! But what does it mean to belong? Who is responsible for ensuring that we are able to develop a sense of belonging? What sorts of things need to happen, and what kinds of structures need to be in place, in order for us to experience what has been described as a “basic human need”?

FLI Foundations 02 - Anthropological Approaches to Health, Illness, and Healing

In conventional Western medical practice, illness is commonly approached as a politically and economically neutral phenomenon. Illness is treated as primarily a biological state, with a focus on an individual's symptoms and cells. In this course, we consider health, illness, and healing as part of larger social and political processes, including how illness and care are related to the uneven distribution of power and wealth. We also briefly explore broader social and cultural frameworks for understanding and addressing wellness.

FLI Foundations 03 - Toward Attunement

This Foundations (FLI) seminar introduces the habits of mind at the center of a liberal arts education: careful reading, sustained attention, and the willingness to think and speak in the presence of difficulty. In our two meetings, we’ll treat writing not as the production of text, but as a site of thinking: a process that unfolds over time through uncertainty, revision, and sustained attention. Traditionally, that process has been captured in written form. Here, we will engage many of the same intellectual practices (interpretation, analysis, synthesis, revision) without always committing them to the page. In this sense, we are treating writing as a technology derived from speech, and choosing, at times, to set that technology aside in order to focus more directly on the thinking it was designed to preserve.

FLI Foundations 04 - Water, Race, and Justice: A Global Perspective

Two-session module — Deon Knights, Environmental Studies

Session 1 — Water: Where It Comes From and Who Gets It An introduction to water as a physical resource and a social one — how it moves through the world, how it's used, and who bears the costs.

  • The water cycle and global freshwater distribution

  • Virtual water and embedded water consumption patterns

  • Water access, race, and class — introduction to environmental justice

  • Case study: Cape Town's "Day Zero" crisis

  • Including an outdoor activity where we look at thermal infrared signals of groundwater discharge in Sunset Lake.Or we may look at benthic macroinvertebrates (indicators of stream health) on the Casperkill Creek

Session 2 — Environmental Justice and the Just Transition Building on Session 1, students go deeper into why environmental burdens fall where they do — and what frameworks exist for change.

  • Environmental racism: from Flint to the Global South

  • What is a "just transition"? Comparing policy, Indigenous, and feminist perspectives

  • Who decides? Power, community, and the politics of environmental change

  • Student discussion: What would justice look like in practice?

  • No prior background required — designed as an entry point

  • Discussion-based and accessible for students coming from high school

FLI Foundations 05 - Introduction to Global Art History: Asian Art and Visual Culture

This course introduces you to the foundational concepts, themes, debates, and trends in the history of art of the global premodern world, focusing on Asian art and networks of exchange. Defying canonical Euro-centric narratives, we will explore how objects and artistic concepts were circulated across the trans-Asian routes crossing borders in East, Central, North, and South Asia. Why do we find Roman glass in ancient Chinese tombs? How did Buddhist imagery change after Alexander the Great’s failed conquest of India? What do the discoveries of Chinese ceramics in Madagascar and Kenya tell us about maritime trade in the 16 th century? How did artists in the Mongol empire respond to the plague in the Middle Ages? At the heart of these questions are larger issues of trade, war, migration, climate crises, and globalization – major factors in the creation and dissemination of art. The course is designed to reflect aspects of one of Vassar’s historic and foundational humanities courses, ART 105.