FHI Social Practice Lab

The FHI Social Practice Lab (SPL) at Duke brings together scholars, artists, and activists through regional and international projects, public interventions, advanced research, and other exchanges.

The Social Practice Lab’s operations center on the creation of multi-year projects and public interventions, as well as smaller, student-led productions happening on a single year or semester basis. SPL projects are chosen and developed for their ability to ask challenging questions, create interdisciplinary collaborations with a concrete outcome or aesthetic experience, and foster exchanges across academic levels that may begin, develop, or end outside the classroom. Rather than think of the humanities as being in crisis, SPL sees this time as a critical period for their reinvention, a process that may be inseparable from the activist impulse behind creating a more intelligent, creative, and just society.