Blog

The Liberal Arts Action Lab is a new partnership between Trinity College and Capital Community College. Based in downtown Hartford at 10 Constitution Plaza, the Action Lab is a space where community members, nonprofits, government agencies, and social entrepreneurs can come with research questions or problems that they want solved to help their own work in the city. Using the resources of Trinity and Capital students, faculty fellows, and the Action Lab director, teams will develop and implement research projects to help offer solutions to these problems.

Four years into the Henry Luce Foundation’s Luce Initiative on Asian Studies and the Environment (LIASE) grant to Trinity College, we are celebrating the main activities and accomplishments supported by this grant administered by CUGS through an international symposium on campus on April 3-4, 2017. Entitled “Urban Sustainability in Asia: Many Dimensions, Multiple Disciplines, and Diverse Approaches,” this symposium highlights a number of Luce-funded curricular activities.

A key to the success of urban-global programming at Trinity over the last few years since the launch of the Center for Urban and Global Studies (CUGS) in 2007 is the consistent focus on linking and integrating local (Hartford-based) and global aspects of urban studies and engagement on one hand, bridging classroom and experiential learning across multiple field sites. It also involves building strong connections between faculty teaching and research and student learning and research that span the local-global nexus. To illustrate how we have. implemented this integrated strategy, we provide an account for a trio of initiatives at different stages of execution that have intersected and reinforced each other’s strengths with synergistic benefits for both students and faculty.