‘Play’ is a term that spans a gamut of endeavors in the liberal arts without resolving the tensions. Bounding and bouncing across diverse histories and geographies, play connects action and rest, pleasure and exhaustion, young and old, human and nonhuman, and intellect and whimsy. This two-year theme (23-24 and 24-25) invites the campus and its community partners to explore, embody, and enact the complications of the theme. Engaging playful paradoxes as well as the inequalities that surround the theme, we ask: Is it work to intellectualize play? How and when is playing around seen as a subversive and even dangerous act? Who gets to play, and who doesn’t? Play, as practice and concept, challenges the demands of intellectual rigor, offering possibilities for haptic engagement, queer curiosities, happenings and actions, and fun.