“It’s challenged me in ways I didn’t think I could challenge myself before. I’ve experienced things that I never would have thought I would experience in my four years at college.”
Connor Melehan T’28 is talking about Capacious Minds Fellows, a pilot program launched by the Kenan Institute for Ethics in 2025. An experimental year-long fellowship designed by former civil rights lawyer and choreographer Brooks Emanuel, Capacious Minds Fellows asks students to expand their minds — and even their notion of what a mind is — through activities centered on embodiment, play, and wonder.
If it all sounds a bit mysterious — that’s the point. The fellows never knew exactly what they would be doing week by week.
One session that focused on movement exercises put them well outside their comfort zones — even the students with backgrounds in dance.
“There were a couple shared glances between everybody in the group, like, ‘are we really doing this?’” Melehan jokes.
But he soon found that he gained a lot of “comfort with discomfort” as he said yes to new experiences, week after week.
Through cultivating open-mindedness — and sharing experiences in which everyone felt a little vulnerable — the fellows developed unusually strong bonds with each other.
“The program evolved from building these ‘capacious minds’ to having really insightful conversations and growing as a group,” Melehan says. “We’re pushing each other to grow, be it through shared values or even the areas where we disagree.”
This not only made the students more comfortable disagreeing with each other, even on topics they felt passionately about, but encouraged them to lead with curiosity — and always put the other person’s humanity first.
“The way you value them the way you care about them, and them being another human being always supersedes any sort of disagreement,” Melehan says.
His experiences started to influence his decisions outside of the fellowship, too. For example, he chose a living situation where he would have to practice speaking Spanish during a summer study abroad program.
“When I had the choice between a homestay or a residence hall… I thought, ‘you know what? Why not the homestay?’” he says. “There’s a wealth of growth in that discomfort.”
Through intentionally slow-paced activities and weekly reflections, Capacious Minds Fellows also helps students practice attunement — to others, to the world around them, and to themselves.
During his second semester in the program, Melehan realized he was rethinking his path at Duke.
“I spent the first three semesters at Duke trying to make myself look as good as possible for law school applications, when I had zero desire to be a lawyer,” he says. “You end up so busy that you don’t give yourself the time to actually think about why you’re pursuing something or if you even want to pursue it.
“And I think that’s one of the most dangerous traps that exist at a school like Duke,” he continued, ”where you come in already feeling behind. And so you pour all of your time and energy into catching up…until you have a second to breathe and realize, ‘Wait, I don’t want this.’”
One day, while studying for the LSAT in his dorm, Melehan suddenly thought, “Wait, why am I doing this?”
He closed the book, looked at the wall, and thought for an hour before he realized, “This isn’t what I want to do. I need to keep digging.”
“Capacious Minds has qualitatively changed me...It’s made me more comfortable with the unknown, and more excited to pursue areas that can propel my growth.”
While Capacious Minds Fellows didn’t give Melehan the answer to that question, it did give him the confidence to sit with uncertainty until he could figure it out on his own.
“Capacious Minds has qualitatively changed me,” he says. “It’s made me more comfortable with the unknown, and more excited to pursue areas that can propel my growth.”
The Prison Engagement Initiative at the Kenan Institute for Ethics invites undergraduate students to apply to become 2026–2027 Justice Lab affiliates and fellows.