Awe on the Margins: Youth Perspectives on the (im)possibilities of Human Flourishing
On Wednesday, April 15th, 2026, from 1-1:50 PM in FXB G13 and online, all are welcome to join us for the sixth and final installment in our Virtues for Well-being Seminar Series, featuring Dr. Demond Hill.
Seminar Description
Awe—an emotional response to vastness that transcends our ordinary frames of reference—has the power to transform perspectives, foster human flourishing, and enhance well-being. Yet little is known about where awe emerges in marginalized urban contexts, who can access it, and how it might disrupt structural inequality. This seminar asks: What would it take for us to be more honest with the lives we are living, living on, stepping over, and forgetting?
Drawing from the first year of a three-year youth participatory action research project with 100 Black and Brown high school students in Boston, this work explores how youth make sense of, complicate, experience, locate, and mobilize awe. Through an after-school awe and flourishing literacy program, students embarked on awe excursions, documented their insights, and designed awe-inspiring spaces. This project cultivates healing, civic engagement, and bold visions for communal health equity. Together, we will consider how “actionable awe” can transform “awe-ful” spaces into “awe-inspiring” ones and illuminate new pathways for collective flourishing.
Speaker Biography
Dr. Demond M. Hill is an Assistant Professor of Health Equity at Tufts University in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development. His research, grounded in transdisciplinary, critical, applied, humanizing-based approaches, focuses on the mental health and well-being of marginalized children, youth, and their families, with a particular emphasis on Black populations. Dr. Hill collaborates with communities to promote and protect opportunities for awe, belonging, and human flourishing among Black and Brown communities within systemic inequality. His work centers marginalized communities’ voices and lived experiences and incorporates youth- and community-based participatory action approaches to identify and strengthen protective factors that inform policy and promote mental health equity.
Speaker Information
Dr. Demond Hill
Organizers
ⓘ Harvard Chan School hosts a diverse array of speakers, invited to share both scholarly research and personal perspectives. They do not speak for the School, and hosting them does not imply endorsement of their views, organizations, or employers.