Friendship, Love, and Desire

The coursework for this Endeavor community involves taking a one-unit course in the fall semester and a half-unit course in the spring semester, both taught by Dr. Radi.

FYS 100 satisfies a general education requirement; students are required to take one first-year seminar (FYS) during each of their first semester at Richmond.

IDST 190 is a half-unit project based course part of the Endeavor program.

FYS 100: Friendship, Love, and Desire

College is often the first time you’re building relationships in a new environment, with more freedom, less structure, and a lot of new choices. Friendships shift, values get tested, and love and desire can feel more intense, partly because the social world is bigger and more independent. In this course, we’ll look closely at how relationships begin, what strengthens them, what breaks them down, and what it can mean to sustain—or repair—them, using tools from philosophy, psychology, literature, visual art, film, and cultural analysis.

Alongside philosophical and literary texts, we’ll draw on psychology to think about attachment, trust, empathy, boundaries, trauma, and identity formation. You’ll explore how personal history, social context, and the body’s language shape the way you connect to others, and why certain relational patterns can be so hard to change, even when you see them clearly.

We’ll also turn to specific novels, films, television series, music, and visual art to see how friendship, love, and desire are being represented, and questioned, in the present moment. Rather than speaking in general terms, we’ll analyze particular scenes, characters, and narratives to ask what they reveal about intimacy, power, vulnerability, and self-presentation. We’ll examine how social media, dating apps, and AI reshape intimacy, how we present ourselves, seek validation, compare, and manage vulnerability, and what literature and the arts reveal about connection that algorithms can’t fully capture.

Some guiding questions include:

• How have friendship, love, and desire been defined and debated in philosophy and literature across cultures and historical periods?
• What does psychology suggest about attachment, conflict, repair, boundaries, and emotional safety?
• How is friendship connected to moral responsibility: what do we owe one another, and why?
• Can people with deeply different values or worldviews be genuine friends or life partners, and what would that require?
• How do social media, dating apps, and AI reshape intimacy, trust, and vulnerability?
• When does erotic desire deepen connection, and when does it complicate or destabilize it?
• What does it mean to practice care, consent, accountability, and ethical attention in everyday life?

IDST 190: Friendship, Love, and Desire Seminar

In the Spring semester, you will collaborate on a campus-wide cultural project that brings ideas from philosophy, psychology, literature, and the arts into public conversation. Projects may include inviting a speaker, staging a performance or reading, curating a physical or digital art exhibit, producing a podcast or short film, or designing an interactive event that explores relationships in contemporary life.

Through this work, students will develop valuable skills in collaboration, grant writing, creative production, public speaking, ethical storytelling, and community partnership building. The seminar emphasizes learning by doing, moving from analysis to creation, while engaging the broader campus in thoughtful dialogue about friendship, love, and desire in the world we inhabit now.

Dr. Lidia Radi is an Associate Professor of French and Italian.

As part of the Endeavor program, you will particiapte in the popular Endeavor Pre-Orientation program, where you will take a short course led by Dr. Lidia Radi.

Short Course Description: Friendship, Intercultural Dialogue and the Liberal Arts

Social media networks, sophisticated apps, technologically advanced devices have connected people and places around the globe in unprecedented ways. We can visit countries, learn about new cultures and their cuisines, shop or invest globally, or communicate in real time with people from all corners of the world, without ever needing to step outside or leave the comforts of our own homes. If on the one hand this global connectedness reflects the genius and creativity of the human mind, along with our ever growing desire to explore new places and connect with other human beings, on the other we are also living through a moment in time in which communities are becoming increasingly polarized, afraid of the Other, suspicious of any novelties or ideas that go beyond their known territory. This short course will be divided in two parts: the theoretical part will delve into an analysis of how intercultural dialogue can alleviate the latter fears and suspicions, while the practical side will apply interculturalism to real life events and cases. How can we see life from a different perspective? How can we build healthy relationships within our community? How can we, as individuals, promote meaningful dialogue with people who experience life in different contexts from our own (different linguistic, cultural, or political realities)? What is the responsibility of individuals and citizens in this context? Since you are about to embark in a Liberal Arts education, we will frame the conversation around the role that this kind of education plays in forming individuals and in building a community of caring and responsible citizens.