Lecture - Kristen Ghodsee

Everyday Utopia: Rethinking Community through Secular and Spiritual Perspectives

For millennia, people from different ethnic, religious, and cultural traditions have resided together in nonconsanguineous extended households. Whether these were small groups sharing tribal longhouses; celibate, pious, and ascetic cenobites settled in monasteries, convents, or beguinages; or secularists fully engaged with the world and living in colleges, phalansteries, or planned microdistricts, many of our ancestors rejected the isolation of the individual dwelling shared only with a handful of one’s blood-related or legally recognized kin. Our architectural options today reflect a specific set of choices about the ideal habitat for human flourishing, choices often born of our past attachments to patrilineal and patrilocal traditions. How might we live differently?