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The world’s hardest problems don’t respect department boundaries, and the people who solve them need practice thinking across them. Co-Labs give every student that practice, collaborating with peers trained in different disciplines, working with faculty who model that same collaboration, and testing ideas with partners who have a real stake in the outcome.

Building on the proven model of Hamilton’s own innovative Justice Lab, a Co-Lab is an intensive, interdisciplinary set of three to four courses, taken together by the same cohort of students and built by faculty from different disciplines around a shared theme. Each Co-Lab combines academic rigor with opportunities for original research, experiential problem-solving, and collaboration with external partners.

How Co-Labs Work

  • Students enroll as a cohort in shared, complementary courses designed collaboratively by faculty from different fields (enrollments are 12–16 per cohort, depending on the nature of the Co-Lab).
  • Coursework incorporates original research, hands-on problem-solving, and off-the-Hill experiences.
  • Each Co-Lab is organized around a common theme: Democracy and Citizenship, Justice, Technology, Art and Culture, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Sustainability, and others faculty continue to develop.

Innovation Co-Labs

An Innovation Co-Lab is a small cluster of linked courses taught by faculty from different disciplines around a shared question. Students take the courses together as a cohort, work with the same classmates and professors across them, and put their learning to use through hands-on projects, visiting experts, and site visits.

Spring 2027 Innovation Co-Labs

Apply through the individual links below for each Co-Lab. Applications are required and are due by Monday, November 9, 2026.

Embodied Storytelling (three courses)

Brianna Burke, Anna Huff, and Casey Avaunt

  • No prerequisites
  • Limited to 12 students

What kinds of meaning live in non-linear, in-between spaces? This Co-Lab explores storytelling that moves beyond linear structures, with a focus on Indigenous speculative futures, decentralized storytelling, play, performance, and the meeting of technology, material culture, and the moving body. You will make hybrid work that draws on the Center's new depth camera systems, spatial audio tools, and AR/VR systems, and you will learn from leading storytellers, artists, and technologists through lectures, workshops, and symposiums in the Center. Planned site visits might include EMPAC, Forge Project, the Wellin Museum, and the CultureHub in New York City.

Students enroll in all three courses:
Application Deadline

Apply by Monday, Nov. 9.

Embodied Storytelling Co-Lab Application

Innovations in Environmental Policy (two courses)

Aaron Strong and Jeffrey Cross

  • Prerequisites: ECON 100, and either ECON 166 or ENVST 206
  • Limited to 16 students

We are in an era of rapid change and upheaval in both global and federal environmental regulation and management. This two-course co-lab explores ideas for innovations in environmental policy that have the potential to improve environmental, social, and economic outcomes. Together, the two courses and experiential learning components will help students understand the political, economic, and technical dimensions of nascent efforts to circumvent or challenge the dismantling of the environmental regulatory state. Students will also examine the role that generative AI tools play in shaping the design of effective environmental policies for the future.

There are also two field trips to Boston and Washington, D.C., both of which will involve staying overnight.

Students enroll in both courses:
Application Deadline

Apply by Monday, Nov. 9.

Innovations in Environmental Policy Co-Lab Application

Justice Labs

Our Levitt Center’s Justice Lab seeks to pair the theoretical and multidisciplinary study of complex societal challenges with the practical application of these concepts in a local context. Past programs have focused on criminal justice reform, community health & wellness, immigration and asylum, and human rights and civil rights.

Spring 2027 Justice Labs

Constitutional Moments: Creating, Sustaining, and Changing How We Govern (four courses)

Professors Frank Anechiarico, Ty Seidule, Heather Sullivan, and Benj Widiss

  • Limited to 16 students; students must enroll in all four courses
  • Open to all class years

As the United States enters its second 250 years with the oldest codified constitution in the world, is it time for another constitutional moment? Trust in the federal government sits at or near historic lows, and confidence in the electoral process itself has slipped alongside it. Meanwhile, a movement most people have never heard of is quietly approaching a constitutional threshold: twenty states have already passed applications for an Article V Convention of the States. Whether or not you think the constitutional order is in crisis, more people are asking foundational questions about it than at any point in a generation; Who gets to write the rules? Who gets to change them? And what happens when the answers stop feeling legitimate to the people governed by them? 

This Justice Lab will give students the tools to think rigorously about those questions – not as abstractions, but as lived, contested, and repeatedly re-imagined processes, approached through historical, legal, comparative, and aesthetic lenses. Students will step into the shoes of the original framers to write the Constitution, then reconvene as a hypothetical Convention of the States to amend it. They will analyze constitutional law through landmark court cases and the doctrines that underpin them. They will trace how the founding moment itself has never stopped being rewritten, from the founding documents as rhetorical performances through two centuries of American fiction, poetry, and film that reclaim, contest, and re-stage it. And they will study how other countries in the Americas have handled constitutional rupture and refounding. Students will leave with a working command of constitutional design, argument, and interpretation: how constitutions get made, how they break, and how they get imaginatively remade. 

Experiential learning for this Justice Lab will include two long-form role-playing games in COLEG/GOVT/HIST281. The Constitutional Convention of 1787 focuses on the most fundamental political and legal event in American history. Students in the game, playing the actual delegates to the Convention, gather in “Philadelphia” to write a new constitution for the United States. The second game creates a hypothetical “Convention of the States” to add amendments to the Constitution. Students will also have a required evening event in mid-April.

Students enroll in all four courses:
Application Deadline

Apply by Wednesday, Oct. 28.

Constitutional Moments Justice Lab Application

Perspectives on Inequality

Amy Koenig, Anne Feltovich, Chaise LaDousa, Ann Owen, and Keelah Williams

  • Prerequisites: ECON-100; students who have not taken a 100-level Psychology course should seek permission from Keelah Williams

The topic of Inequality appears in the news almost daily, from AI reshaping education and the workplace to rising housing, healthcare, and wage gaps that make life less affordable for many Americans. Coverage of racial and gender disparities—in pay, policing, health outcomes, and political representation—continues alongside investigations into how the justice system treats people differently depending on income, race, or where they live. The Levitt Center's Spring '27 Justice Lab: Perspectives on Inequality is a four-course, semester-long opportunity designed to deepen students' understanding of inequality and the challenges it poses. 

More specifically, the Lab investigates how disparities arise and persist across societies and systems, from ancient Greece and Rome to the contemporary United States. Students take four courses in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences, exploring how inequality manifests in ancient cultures, the U.S. educational and legal systems, and the U.S. economy, and learning to analyze evidence using historical, ethnographic, legal, and econometric approaches. Experiential and applied learning activities round out the Lab, including court observation and peer tutoring in Utica, as well as academic research.

The Justice Lab courses meet during regularly scheduled course times which are listed in the course descriptions below. This means that students will be able to get to 4 p.m. obligations and work out schedules for on-campus jobs.

If you are accepted to the Lab, we will register you for the classes, and you will not need to go through the normal Registration process. You can find the course schedule here.

If you are interested in participating in this Lab but cannot commit to all four courses, please go ahead and apply, and we will be in touch to discuss your situation. If you have questions about the Lab, please email us at levitt@hamilton.edu or, if your question pertains to a specific course within the lab, you can reach out to the faculty member for that course.

Students enroll in all four courses:

Perspectives on Inequality Justice Lab Application

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