The Jackman Humanities Institute is pleased to announce three new Annual Themes for 2026-2029: Doubles, Doppelgangers, Mediation/Contestation and Gift and Debt. They were drawn from suggestions from across the University of Toronto community and developed by the JHI Advisory Board with special assistance from the Annual Themes subcommittee, for whose assistance we are deeply grateful. The following programming initiatives are selected for their relevance to the year’s theme:
2026-27 Doubles, Doppelgangers
Doubles, mirror images, and infinite recursive nesting of identical structures are omnipresent in nature and in culture. Our stories rely on concepts such as the play within a play, game within a game, dream within a dream, mise en abyme, self-representation, halls of mirrors, replicas/worlds in miniature, imposters, cycles, microhistories and metanarratives. Within our reflections on mind, thought, and metaphysics, we explore reality as (nested) simulation, infinite or eternal spaces or beings, cosmologies where each thing reflects/contains each other thing, hauntings/ghostly echoes/premonitions, and reflections into infinity. Our reflections of nature, whether human, biological, or computational, rely crucially on notions of recursion, recurrence, fractals, and the distortions that accrue across them (mutation, tradition, drift). In disciplines across the humanities, we observe the use of fractals, spirals, images contained in themselves, doubles, reflections (of reflections of reflections), and rhizomes. What might an exploration of doubles and recursion reveal about the ways that we reflect our realities?
2027-28 Mediation/Contestation
This theme attends to the tension inherent to acts of mediation between contested claims, spaces, and categories. It encourages us to delve into the processes of establishing and dismantling cultural hierarchies between categorical binaries such as high and low, beginning and end, or large and small, offering a richer understanding of the social dynamics that play out in such historically situated phenomena. It requires that we attend to processes, actors, and sites of mediation—the practices, practitioners, institutions, genres, circuits of communication, and, especially, power relations that either (re)affirm or contest boundaries. Mediation and Contestation invites us to revisit media and modalities in complex dynamics of cultural production more broadly.
2028-29 Gift and Debt
Gifts and debt permeate human exchanges. Language relies on a pragmatic common ground where information is offered and expected; narrative offers a quest towards some ultimate gift during which debts are incurred and repaid; cultural relations consider debts as commitments and gifts as promises that enact and sustain social relations. How might concepts of gift and debt illuminate our current social condition, the real and imaginary debts we owe to previous and future generations and the unexpected and expected gifts we can and might provide to them? Gift and Debt provides a starting point for reflections that transcend despair and passivity, and target themes of reliance, vulnerability, exchange, and collective resiliency in the face of systematic inequities.
