Capacious Minds
An Initiative of the Kenan Institute for Ethics
Capacious Minds invites students into practices that encourage them to think outside of predefined binaries and instead approach problems through the co-creation of expansive, wildly imaginative spaces.
About
Launched in the 2025–2026 academic year, Capacious Minds is a group of curricular and co-curricular programs for undergraduates that challenge them to step outside of their comfort zones — whether intellectually, socially, or emotionally — to open up new arenas for growth.
While Capacious Minds is intended in part to help students navigate conflict in a time of increasing political entrenchment, it doesn’t start or end by exploring common conflicting views. Instead, it seeks to help students build community across difference, explore new ways of thinking and being, and expand their minds into new and multifaceted possibilities rather than feeling “stuck” with what already exists.
Fundamentally interdisciplinary in nature, Capacious Minds draws upon diverse sources of knowledge production, inside and outside the university. It engages students in practices of experiential learning, allowing students to increase both their tolerance for uncertainty and their imaginative capability
FELLOWSHIPS
Capacious Minds Fellows
Capacious Minds Fellows is a yearlong program that aims to help undergraduate students develop “capacious minds” through multiple experiential practices, including
- open-ended and non-linear modes of engagement, such as play;
- embodied movements that reveal how our entire physical beings are involved in thinking, not just our brains; and
- the cultivation of wonder through the observation of the natural world.
The second semester of the fellowship focuses on building empathy and understanding, even across disagreement, within a community of trust.
Groundwork Fellows
Groundwork Fellows is a nine-month fellowship program that asks students to reflect on relational and structural organizing: how groups form, how they make decisions, why they fall apart, and what helps them endure. As a complement to a commitment that involves working with any kind of collective, Groundwork Fellows observe and reflect on the often unseen social infrastructures that hold collectives together. They experiment with practices that support cultures of belonging, and they co-create repeated gatherings that bring people together to connect on and beyond campus.
COURSES
Capacious Minds courses bring together diverse modes of knowledge production to conceive change-making possibilities and envision new modes of collective life.
Some Capacious Minds courses are woven into the first-year curriculum through a Kenan-affiliated FOCUS cluster or Constellation.
Swinging Toward Justice: Jazz, Moral Imagination, and Democratic Life
(ETHICS 192FS)
Patrick T. Smith
FOCUS: Free For All — Freedom, Justice, and Citizenship
This course in political friendship and moral thought examines the ethical conditions of democratic life through jazz as a metaphor and model of collective action. It sees jazz as a distinctive ethical and civic practice shaped by improvisation, collaboration, and shared responsibility. Students will study key themes in jazz alongside engaging classic and contemporary texts in moral and political philosophy alongside themes in jazz to consider questions of justice, agency, and solidarity in pluralistic societies. By attending to practices of deep listening, responsiveness, and creative risk taking, we ask how freedom operates within constraint, how authority is negotiated without silencing individuality, and how collective practices can sustain pluralistic communities. By treating jazz performance as a living laboratory of public life, the course asks whether democracy can “swing”— and how cultivating these habits might orient us toward a more just public life.
Imagination for Liberation: Creative Strategies for Social Movement
(ETHICS 196CNS)
Brooks Emanuel
Constellation: How Are We Political Bodies?
How does change happen? This course explores the history of systems of oppression in the United States; social movements and the strategies they use to enact change, including legal and legislative tactics and artistic interventions; and how embodied practices can open up new ways of knowing that allow us to imagine radically different futures. Students will integrate and field test these different approaches on issues that align with their interests.
Other Capacious Minds courses are open to all undergraduates. They include:
What If? Movements, Organization Logics, and the Politics of Possibility
(ETHICS 410S)
Kay Jowers
How do people come to see something as unjust—and decide it can change? How do they imagine new solutions and alternative futures? Blending theory from social science on law, movements, and organizations with works of speculative literature as thought experiments into the possible, students examine how collective grievances form, how movements mobilize, how new organizational logics emerge, and how individuals and groups envision structural change. Informed by theory and analysis of fictional works that explore alternative realities, students then apply course content by conducting interviews or focus groups to explore how movements and organizations envision and pursue social transformation.
REQUEST FOR PROPOSALS
During the 2026–2027 academic year, the Capacious Minds Initiative is requesting proposals for projects, ranging from small pedagogical experiments to multi-year research projects, to further develop the concept of “capaciousness of mind” — what it might mean, how we might develop it, and what kinds of communities form in the process.
Since Capacious Minds is fundamentally concerned with the formation of undergraduate students, projects must have a clear application to pedagogy within the context of a university education.
All Duke faculty and staff are eligible to submit proposals. Proposals that engage multiple disciplines and/or diverse modes of knowing are encouraged, as are projects rooted within a single discipline or professional field.
Read the RFP here.
People
Patrick T. Smith
Director
Capacious Minds Initiative
Patrick T. Smith is an associate research professor of theological ethics and bioethics at Duke University Divinity School and an associate professor in population health sciences at Duke University School of Medicine. He is a Senior Fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke where he directs the Capacious Minds Initiative. He has served as President of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities (2025-2027) and is an associate editor of the American Journal of Bioethics.
In his training as a philosopher, he is especially committed to exploring the close and often forgotten links between bioethics, public health, community engagement, and the arts in the pursuit of health justice. Smith’s work is informed by the social and political thought of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the broader tradition from which King emerged, particularly its vision of beloved community and democratic citizenship. In addition, he often considers and applies in his work how jazz music concepts might inform our approaches to ethics and our common life together.
Brooks Emanuel
Fellowship Director
Capacious Minds Fellows
Brooks Emanuel has backgrounds in both (1) dance and choreography and (2) civil rights law, policy advocacy, and legislative and political work. He obtained his J.D. from NYU Law and his MFA in Dance from Duke University. He has both performed at Symphony Space in New York City and drafted petitions to the United States Supreme Court. Among other roles, Brooks has had the great fortune to work for both Stacey Abrams (Georgia House Democratic Caucus) and Bryan Stevenson (Equal Justice Initiative), as well as serving as public policy director for Planned Parenthood Southeast. A large portion of his work in these realms focused particularly on challenging the injustices of the criminal legal system and protecting voting rights. In the dance world, he has performed with Michael Mao Dance, PearsonWidrig Dance, Beacon Dance, and Several Dancers Core, among others. At the Kenan Institute for Ethics, Brooks creates and implements both curricular and cocurricular programming for undergraduates around radical imagination, expansive thinking, and strategies — including embodied and artistic — for changing the world.
