Current Faculty-Driven Initiatives
FDIs are programs that build community and scholarship on a defined topic of relevance to the humanities, arts, or social sciences. They bring together faculty or teaching staff from multiple units across SHASS or the Institute, collaborating on a common area of study or issue.
Living Climate Futures Lab
The Living Climate Futures Lab (LCFL) has been named the recipient of the inaugural Faculty-Driven Initiative (FDI) Seed Grant from the MIT Human Insight Collaborative (MITHIC).
The interdisciplinary project is administered through MIT Anthropology and includes more than 19 faculty and affiliates from across the Institute. The LCFL is premised on the recognition that climate change – its causes, impacts, and solutions – are simultaneously ecological, economic, technological, political, social, and cultural.
The LCFL is intended to serve as a home base and umbrella organization at MIT for the growing number of researchers who are interested in its three pillars:
Focusing on how climate change plays out in people’s everyday lives
Creating knowledge/research partnerships with community organizations around climate change
Building bridges across STEM and SHASS disciplines.
Global Humanities Initiative (GHI)
The Global Humanities Initiative (GHI) has been spearheaded by Wiebke Denecke 
since 2021 with the goal of creating an MIT-based worldwide community that works globally towards reinvigorating humanistic learning and education by radically expanding the geographical scope and temporal depth of humanistic disciplines, thereby reimagining their critical relevance to the grand challenges of today’s world.
Compass
Compass is an initiative by MIT faculty across the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences . In the Compass class, students and faculty explore fundamental questions and how such questions relate to the everyday decisions we make about what is important to us, what is real and true, and what is right.
