The Culture & Politics (CAP) Lab
Ideas in Action: Understanding the American Experiment
The Culture & Politics (CAP) Lab at New College of Florida approaches Sarasota and the Gulf Coast as a living laboratory for understanding the forces shaping American society. Our work begins from a simple premise: culture is not background noise but the stage on which our deepest political, moral, and spiritual dramas play out.
The Lab’s research centers on six pillars—“The Return of the Sacred,” “The Intimate Revolution,” “The New American Order,” “Migration, Mobility & Access,” “Technology and the Human Condition,” and “The Culture of Sport”—each offering a lens onto the moral and cultural transformations of contemporary America.
Students and researchers engage directly with local communities through ethnography, interviews, and collaborative projects that bring ideas into practice. The CAP Lab is both an intellectual workshop and a civic space, providing a setting for open conversation, reflection, and fieldwork that begins not in abstraction but in the streets, beaches, and neighborhoods of Sarasota.
Even in an age of secularism, religion endures—and often flourishes—in fresh and unexpected forms. The lab explores how faith communities, spiritual movements, and moral traditions adapt to modern life and offer new vocabularies of purpose.
Few areas of American life have changed more dramatically than gender and sexuality. From family structures to dating cultures, the terrain of intimacy has become a key site of social transformation. The lab studies how individuals and communities navigate these changes and what they reveal about freedom, desire and love.
America is undergoing a profound cultural and political realignment. Traditional party loyalties, class identities, and cultural blocs are breaking apart, giving rise to new—and sometimes surprising—coalitions. Using Sarasota and the Gulf Coast as a field site, the lab investigates how national tensions over identity, ideology, and belonging play out in local settings, from neighborhood politics to community activism.
Migration—both across borders and within the United States—remains a defining feature of our age. The lab investigates how people move, settle, and seek belonging in a world of constant circulation. From immigrant labor to retirement migration, the Gulf Coast provides a living map of aspiration and mobility, illuminating the moral and material pathways through which people seek access and belonging.
New technologies—from smartphones to artificial intelligence—are reconfiguring social relations and reshaping what it means to be human. The lab studies how digital life mediates human connection and explores the ethical, economic, and existential questions posed by technological acceleration.
Sport is among the most revealing windows into American life. It fuses passion, identity, and moral ideals—fairness, merit, teamwork, and excellence—into a shared spectacle. The lab explores how sport shapes belonging, character, and civic virtue in Florida and beyond, and how athletic competition mirrors deeper cultural tensions about justice, hierarchy, and community.
Meet The Team
