Programs

In London, as in life, there exists an abundance of possibility beyond any plan. Steering it well, moment by moment, charts both the course of a journey and the course of a life. The person who can read a situation generously, who can perceive uncertainty and change as the source of opportunity — in real time — and act on it, is positioned to navigate well and catch hold of life’s abundance along the way. This course cultivates this art of meeting the moment.

Every real situation holds more than we expect of it — more possible directions, more skills it can call on, more felt textures for making sense of what the moment is asking. A cultivated discernment brings that range into view and finds the better paths within it. Drawing on performance studies, cognitive science, theory of interpretation, virtue ethics, and the philosophy of experience, this interdisciplinary course develops the capacity to read and respond to dynamic situations with skill and creativity. Through a practical deployment of these interdisciplinary resources, students practice attention in the moment by reading situations, improvisation by acting within that reading, and integration by weaving events into a more capacious and generative story as the day unfolds into something real — and becomes the ground of what comes next. From this ground of first-person experience, we work our way out to see these skills at work in the wider community. In an extended discussion with The Right Honourable Henry McLeish, former First Minister of Scotland and former Member of Parliament at Westminster, we extend these insights of practice into the art of governing, in real time, at the scale of a nation.

For four weeks, London is our studio. Students live and work together as a cohort across one of the world’s most culturally diverse and dynamic cities. Emergent opportunities, productive disruptions, and novel alternatives are everywhere in the daily life of a world capital, and provide the lived occasions of our practice. Shared experiences across the city anchor the inquiry: visits such as the British Museum exploring the nature of perception, the Tate Modern to exhibit the cultivation of shared meaning, a live performance at Shakespeare’s Globe to discover what it teaches about improvisation off the stage, and a sound-walk installation in Regent’s Park to surface the felt texture of experience.

Most excursions, though, are designed and led by the students themselves: working in small groups, you choose the destination, plan the journey, and lead your cohort through it. This work of curating experiences is the heart of the course — the place where attention, improvisation, and integration are practiced in real time. When you discover a more interesting exhibit on the way to the gallery you intended, when the tube is unexpectedly closed and the abundance of alternatives for the afternoon appear, or when making small adjustments with others along the way makes an afternoon richer than any plan could have — each change offers an opportunity for you to cultivate the skills of attention, improvisation, and integration in real time. 

Our method of cultivating attention is to read any live situation along three facets at once — the narrative that gives it direction, the skills it calls on, and the felt texture by which its alternatives are weighed. Held in view together, with enough clarity to act on and learn from, these three facets form a single practice we call the Experience Prism. Reflecting together after each experience consolidates and integrates memory and skill into something that stays in the formation of a life. With practice, the disruption of plans becomes a welcome source of insight into the actual opportunities the world is offering. By making adjustments in real time with attention and reflection, again and again across four weeks, you deepen a durable fluency for navigating dynamic situations well.

The same fluency that shapes an afternoon in London shapes a career and a life. The real opportunities that shape a life are not general.  They are specific — a particular graduate program, a mentor, an opening that could never have been planned for — and they arrive in real time, asking to be recognized and acted on. The discernment that turns a closed tube line into a better afternoon is the same capacity that recognizes such an opening and takes it up while it is still there, which is the only moment an opportunity can be taken. This is how expertise itself works — a practiced eye reads a situation as a pattern and acts. Students leave London with a fluency through change that keeps working and deepening in every room, every conversation, and every decision over the long arc of a life.

To be healthy is to be at home in the world — underway among others, with a body and a surrounding world that meet you, so that life moves and you move with it. Illness is a kind of exile from that ease: the familiar turns effortful, and a world once ready-to-hand has to be negotiated step by step. Healing is a becoming-at-home again, and a person becomes at home only in the company of others who make room for them. The one who can make another feel safe enough to return — who builds the conditions of trust in the moment — does the central work of care. This course cultivates that work in London: the practice of hospitality through which health is invited and trust is built.

Health is always particular: this person, in this body, with this history and these hopes — a life that can be lived well in many ways and can be knocked off course in as many. To meet it well is to perceive that specificity and to help sustain a meaningful form of life from where the person actually stands. Drawing on the phenomenology of health, the health humanities, hermeneutics, virtue ethics, and cognitive science, this interdisciplinary course develops the capacity to build trust and create the conditions of healing. Through a practical deployment of these interdisciplinary resources, students practice attention by reading the person and the situation, attunement by feeling how things are showing up and what is at stake, and care by acting to make a space in which another can be at home — the hospitality through which someone alienated by illness is invited back into their life.

For four weeks, London is our studio. Students make their way from being newcomers in one of the world’s great cities to making the city a new home, learning in their own bodies what it is to be a stranger and what it feels like to become at home again in the world. We work outside the clinic in the world where the lived meaning of health is actually experienced, where the conditions and consequences of trust can be felt directly — in the architecture of a room, the engineering of a tube stop, the welcome of a table, the atmosphere of an unfamiliar neighborhood. We follow the experience of health and care across the city, in visits such as:

• The Wellcome Collection and its exhibits on medicine and the body,
• The Florence Nightingale Museum and the founding vision of modern nursing,
• The Freud Museum and the consulting room as a space of speech and trust,
• The Museum of the Home and the long history of being at home,
• The Bethlem Museum of the Mind and the history of the clinic, and
• The Foundling Museum, where ‘hospital’ once meant the hospitality shown to children taken in.

Curating your own experience is the heart of the course: exploring experience in the first person, you investigate what it is to invite trust and offer hospitality, and how that applies to the art of health and healing. When a host makes you feel expected, when a shared meal turns strangers into companions, or when a small gesture lets someone who felt out of place finally settle in — each is an occasion to study how hospitality is built, and to practice building it yourself. To see how the vulnerability and intimacy of illness, healing, and trust translate from the domain of personal skill and disposition to the character of a community, we sit down with The Right Honourable Henry McLeish, former First Minister of Scotland and former Member of Parliament at Westminster and now chair of the Scottish Brain Health and Dementia Research Strategy Oversight Board, to consider what it takes to build trust in health at the scale of a nation.

Students learn a three-part practice of attention, the Experience Prism, that brings any living moment into view with enough salience to act on and learn from — the story a person is living, the skills and habits that carry it, and the felt texture through which what matters is disclosed. The same prism that reads one’s own experience opens a bridge to another’s: where a life has become impeded, where the world has stopped meeting the body, and where an opening for trust is waiting to be met. Collaborative reflection after each experience consolidates these readings into discernment and skill that stay in the formation of a life. With practice, the ordinary thresholds of a day — an arrival, a meal, a conversation with a stranger — become occasions to feel how trust is made. By building the conditions of hospitality in real time with attention and reflection, again and again across four weeks, you deepen a durable fluency in inviting others home and to extend this insight into the arts of health and healing.

The same fluency that helps a newcomer feel at home in London makes a patient feel safe in a clinic. The encounters that decide whether care heals are specific — this person, this fear, this body in this room — and they arrive in real time, asking to be met. The hospitality that turns an unfamiliar city into a place one can settle is the same capacity that lets a frightened patient trust the person in front of them and return, by degrees, to their own life. This is how the deepest expertise in the health professions works: a practiced attention reads the person as well as the problem, and builds in the moment the trust that care depends on. It is a way of practicing that can be learned, and learning it early is what marks the clinician who is sought out and trusted. Students leave London with a fluency in trust that keeps working and deepening in every room, every conversation, and every person they will one day be asked to care for.

This course is open to honors students of any major — to anyone drawn to building trust, practicing hospitality, and understanding the nature of home and health. It is shaped with particular care for students preparing for the health professions — medicine, nursing, mental health, public health, social work, pharmacy, and the allied health professions — where trust is the daily ground on which the work is practiced.