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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.
The theme of “Humanizing the Law” allows us to explore how laws, recent judicial decisions, and the constant turmoil of our political landscape directly affect members of the Brooklyn College community. With that goal in mind, we ask: What role can the humanities play in humanizing the law? How can the humanities help us understand the ethical consequences of the law? How can they help us understand how the law influences the everyday lives of those who are the targets of the law, whether immigrants, women, the poor, racial and sexual minorities, and so on? What role should the work of humanities-based of scholars play in informing legislative and judicial processes? The residency by Hess Scholar Melissa Murray, Frederick I. and Grace Stokes Professor of Law at New York University School of Law, will help us explore issues raised by the annual theme.
The theme of Defending the Humanities serves to remind us of the Wolfe Institute’s primary mission at a time in which there is much discussion about the “death of the humanities.” As some seek to politicize and/or defund humanities departments and faculty, humanities-inspired scholarship is thriving nationally and at Brooklyn College. By highlighting this work through our programming, including programming featuring Hess Scholar Paul Ortiz, the Wolfe Institute insists on the value of the humanities to our society.
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.
