SUNY series, Humanities to the Rescue – serie

Revisits, reassesses, and reclaims the legacy of May '68 in light of our present cultural and historical emergency.Continental Theory Buffalo is the inaugural volume of the Humanities to the Rescue book series, a public humanities project dedicated to discussing the role of the arts and humanities today. This book is a collaborative act of humanistic renewal that builds on the transcontinental legacy of May 1968 to offer insightful readings of the cultural (d)evolution of the last fifty years. The volume contributors revisit, reclaim and reassess the "revolutionary" legacy of May 1968 in light of the urgency of the present and the future. Their essays are effective illustrations of the potential of such interpretive traditions as philosophy, literature and cultural criticism to run interference with (and offer alternatives to) the instrumentalist logic and predatory structures that are reducing the world to a collection of quantifiable and tradeable resources. The book will be of interest to cultural historians and theorists, media studies scholars, political scientists, and students of French and Francophone literature and culture on both sides of the Atlantic.This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to the generous support of the Humanities Institute at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. It can also be found in the SUNY Open Access Repository.

Makes a case for the power of music and sound in the face of fascistic forces, from modernism to the present.Resonances against Fascism explores some of the myriad ways music and, more broadly, sound have emerged from, and been mobilized to address, the urgencies of the present, from modernism to today. Taking the works and life of the German-born composer Kurt Weill as a pivotal point of departure, the collection brings together a range of critical voices, each with a singular tone, to demonstrate the pervasive force of sound in the face of fascism. Across eight essays, contributors sound out the anti-authoritarian resonances of modernist and avant-garde aesthetics from Weill to Nina Simone and Chico Buarque, to Marguerite Duras and Jean-Luc Godard, to Lou Reed and Patti Smith, and to the choral chants of the Black Lives Matter Movement. The second volume in the Humanities to the Rescue book series, a public humanities project dedicated to discussing the role of the arts and humanities today, Resonances against Fascism takes its cue from the disruptive force of music in traversing the boundaries between-and engaging readers from-modernist and avant-garde studies, critical and cultural theory, musicology and sound studies, critical race and gender studies, performance studies, and philosophy.This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to the generous support of the Humanities Institute at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. It can also be found in the SUNY Open Access Repository.

Challenges readers to use utopian thinking and practice to counter the conditions of the present and create an alternative future."Sometimes that's all it takes to save a world, you see. A new vision. A new way of thinking, appearing at just the right time." These words were spoken by a fictional character in N. K. Jemisin's 2019 utopian novella Emergency Skin. But the idea of saving the world through utopian imaginings has a deep and profound history. At this moment of rupture-with the related crises of the pandemic, racial uprisings, and climate change converging-Utopian Imaginings revisits this history to show how utopian thought and practice offer alternative paths to the future. The third book in the Humanities to the Rescue series, the volume examines both lived and imagined utopian communities from an interdisciplinary perspective. While attentive to the troubled and troubling elements of different spaces and collectives, Utopian Imaginings remains premised in hope, culminating in a series of inspiring exemplars of the utopian potential of the college classroom today.This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to the generous support of the Humanities Institute at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. It can also be found in the SUNY Open Access Repository.

Offers a thorough, multidisciplinary picture of the informational challenges of our media ecosystem, as well as collaborative strategies for addressing them.The unprecedented spread of false and misleading information is the flip side of the Internet's promise of universal access and information democratization. This volume features original contributions from scholars working on the challenge of misinformation across a wide range of STEM, humanities, and art disciplines. Modeling a collaborative, multidisciplinary "convergence approach," Truth-Seeking in an Age of (Mis)Information Overload is structured in three parts. Part 1, "Misinformation and Artificial Intelligence," confronts the danger of outsourcing judgement and decision-making to AI instruments in key areas of public life, from the processing of loan applications to school funding, policing, and criminal sentencing. Part 2, "Science Communication," foregrounds the need to rethink how scientific findings are communicated to the public, calling on scientists to cooperate with colleagues in other disciplines and community representatives to help minimize the negative effects of mis/disinformation in such vital areas as climate change science and public health. Part 3, "Building Trust," further advocates for and explores instances of trust-building initiatives as a necessary precondition of both community-oriented scholarly activity and effective intervention strategies in high impact areas such as public health.This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to the generous support of the Humanities Institute at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. It can also be found in the SUNY Open Access Repository.