Acting Your Age: Meanings of Adulthood

In this course we will take up the question of “what is adulting”? Is it something one becomes or is? Or something one does? Why is it part of a global conversation about changing economic and social conditions? And how does that impact you? To explore these questions, we will read articles by social scientists and discuss essays and poems by writers such as Audre Lorde, Tina Fey, Sandra Cisneros and Warsan Shire. We will visit archives to look for traces of adulting in former Middlebury students and engage in storytelling with children and elders at community sites. The course will culminate in a student-led, public facing creative installation on adulting.