By Dr. Margrit Talpalaru, professor & Academic Convenor for Congress 2025 at George Brown College
George Brown College (GBC) is the first college to host the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences in its 94 years: this has emerged as the refrain for Congress 2025. Rarely do historical events look that way while unfolding. Yet, Congress 2025 offered GBC the privilege to acknowledge history in the making, so we resolved to model our commitment to our values: our learner focus; striving for excellence by acting ethically and with integrity; accountability for environmental, social, and resource sustainability; our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion to create a sense of belonging within our communities (GBC LEAD Values, 2024). To live up to these values, we undertook a thorough consultation process to develop the theme of Reframing togetherness, extending an invitation and a challenge to the researchers, students, educators, policymakers, and the public who will gather at Congress next May.
The theme of Reframing togetherness honours the spirit of GBC’s commitment to humanities and social sciences research and education that prompted our hosting of Congress 2025 in the first place. An active contributor to the theme consultation process, Dr. Gervan Fearon, GBC’s President, explains the roots of this milestone Congress edition: “As one of Canada’s top research colleges, we understand that the connection between thought and applied learning is essential in shaping the future of learning and discovery.” Dipping into GBC’s strengths, the theme invites all Congress 2025 attendees to collaborate on revisioning what it means to live together with other humans, the environment, and evolving technologies in polarized times.
How do we define Reframing togetherness? First, as an intentional response to increasing polarization and its widespread echo chambers that breed confirmation bias. Togetherness transcends the commonalities of specific disciplines and eschews traditional hierarchies. What if we both engaged with and stepped out of our knowledge silos to explore different viewpoints and ways of doing things? At the intersection of adult education theory and change management, reframing is the process of intentionally changing perspective on a given issue, and thus embracing a different viewpoint. This is the challenge of our theme.
Embracing difference and diversity is key to our thematic invitation. As one of Canada's most culturally diverse post-secondary institutions, at GBC we appreciate our responsibility as the downtown college in a city thriving on heterogeneity. We are committed to organizing a Congress that builds on a foundation of equity, diversity, inclusion, and Indigenization (EDII). The Roadmap to the Future: Vision 2030, Strategy 2026 outlines six strategic priorities for GBC’s future impact. The first strategic priority is to attract and engage diverse learners, supported by Priority 5, which prompts us “to build a culture of equity, reconciliation, and belonging” (Strategy 2026).
To that end, when developing the theme, we started by calling on our community to contribute their ideas. A month after Congress 2025 at GBC was announced, we rolled out a survey open to all GBC employees during June and July 2024. We asked about the major issues confronting humanity and we invited our colleagues to suggest thought leaders they want to hear from. Our community’s responses pointed us to our several common threads: from climate change emergency; economic inequality; to the intensified need for social justice; mental health deterioration; and the ever-evolving technological impacts on our work, discourse, and life more broadly. Where do education, learning, and research sit in this matrix? What are our responsibilities and agency in this context of constant change?
With these questions in mind, we centred the unique capacity of Congress 2025 to unite perspectives from across the higher education ecosystem: gathering humanities and social science researchers, educators, and more from across the country at GBC. Ultimately, our theme issued the Congress community a challenge: let’s model togetherness by going beyond our disciplinary boundaries and by combining applied- and fundamental-research methodologies. At GBC, we treasure our capacity to collaborate with our communities and partners, and our theme sets us the goal of identifying collaborative solutions for the global challenges we face. As one of Canada's top research colleges, we want to promote connections between research, innovation, and responsive, applied learning.
Teaching and learning are academic pillars we pride ourselves on at GBC, and we treat them as verbs. They demand action. For over 50 years, our academic programs have been a bridge between theory and practical skills development. Our faculty are highly engaged in interdisciplinary research and the scholarship of teaching and learning. We build on ever evolving pedagogies and technologies to model responsible professionalism and global citizenship starting from an understanding of the historically rooted challenges we face now, and leading to innovative solutions steeped in integrity and caring.
Our college has embraced Universal Design for Learning (UDL) to bolster our collective pedagogies. The UDL Certificate, offered free to all faculty members “expands its current application to address the impacts and intersectionality of oppressions that our learners may experience as barriers to reaching their full learning potential. These barriers may include anti-Black racism, anti-Indigenous racism, homophobia, transphobia, sexism, ableism, etc.” (UDL Certificate, 2024, para. 1). Priority 5 also materialized in “Doing the Work: An Introduction to Anti-Racism,” an online course developed by the Office of Anti-Racism, Equity, and Human Rights Services, and rolled out to all GBC employees (GBC, 2024). Thus, the foundation of EDII sustains our teaching and learning, and we practice our commitment as action, modelling the values of anti-racism, equity, and inclusion for our students to take on in their lives, careers, and the world.
These values underpinning the theme will shine through the Congress programming. The four Big Thinking events will enrich the perspectives on togetherness and provide practical ways of undertaking the process of reframing. Similarly, in addition to traditional offerings, Career Corner workshops will enable attendees’ hands-on participation in inclusive teaching practices, the scholarship of teaching and learning, alongside an expanded understanding of college academic life. Our GBC Programming Committee will also organize a suite of events to showcase the rich and varied work, research, and experiences that our students, colleagues, and wider GBC community generate.
Emerging from GBC values, our theme thus asks the Congress community to roll up our sleeves and continue doing the hard work of critical thinking, analyzing, uncovering, exposing, relating, connecting, storytelling, communicating, and so much more. The forty-eight associations and public attendees gathering at Congress are invited to each bring their own unique perspective to the deep issues confronting humanity nowadays and challenged to work in concert. We might achieve harmony, or we might uncover deeper reasons why multiple angles are important to the conversations even though they generate dissonance. All options remain open, because the crucial opportunity of Congress has always been conversation, both within and across humanities and social sciences fields. Let’s talk more about how we can live together now and in future. At Congress 2025, in the new environment of George Brown College, we open wide our doors, hearts, and minds to welcome and generate collaboration through Reframing togetherness.