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Yearly themes provide cohesion to our programming and reinforce the Wolfe Institute’s promotion of school- and campus-wide conversations grounded in the humanities. Establishing a broad theme each year creates a focus for collaborative events that span a variety of fields. Creating and cosponsoring programs around a relevant topic encourages curricular and extracurricular engagement.
Faculty from across multiple schools alongside student members of the Wolfe Institute Board convened to choose the 2022–23 Wolfe Institute theme from numerous submissions. The consensus for the theme was Constructing Belonging, the connecting of two theme submissions. The idea of belonging was suggested by some faculty members while the theme of constructing was submitted by a student. The reasoning behind both was a sort of anxiety caused by the changes we are experiencing, the difficulties of having to construct a new way of simply existing in-person. It also stands as a call to action, a call to think about our communities and our roles within them: What are we building around us? Who are we building it for? How can we make others know that they belong?
The concept of (re)discovery acknowledges how transformative the experience of the pandemic has been, while simultaneously representing the hope we have for moving through the challenges of the coming year. The latest pandemic has brought a reshaping of individual and community priorities, as well as recognition of what our values are versus what they can be. We have learned new ways to interact and to take and teach classes—and we have committed to new ways of looking at problems and finding solutions.
The 2020–21 Wolfe theme is “transforming.” Transforming acknowledges the evolving world around us, as well as a hope and possibility for our collective future, and each person’s agency in contributing to that future. It recognizes the ways Brooklyn College faculty are transforming their individual disciplines through research, scholarship, and art, and how our students are transforming our communities with their work, ideas, and activism. Transforming also emphasizes the college’s mission statement—to provide transformative education and help students transform their fields and professions.
This theme was suggested by students and approved by a faculty committee. It engages the idea of land broadly, including nations, indigenous studies, the earth and other planets, maps and mapping, digital territories, landscapes, soil, and the verb to land, as in to arrive at a conclusion as well as other manifestations.
For the inaugural 2018–19 year, the theme for Wolfe Institute events is “The Body,” a concept that encompasses the physical body and brain as well as the body politic, the student body, and bodies of literature, congress, or even water.
