In These Times

February 2, 2017 By: Debra Rae Cohen

In These Times is a space for our community to explore issues of social justice, teaching, and research in uncertain times.

Leveling the Playing Field: Liberal Infrastructures at the Olympics

June 6, 2025 By: Harrington Weihl

In the weeks leading up to the 2024 Paris Olympics, coverage was dominated by a number of controversies stemming from the city’s efforts to stage the games: threats of strike from public and private sectors and an attack on rail lines grabbed headlines. But these preliminary and somewhat routine crises were eclipsed by furor over the opening ceremony, which included a runway show featuring drag performers and others staged in the style of a feast.

Humanities to the Rescue: A Militant Editorial Project

May 8, 2024 By: David R. Castillo

Amateur Hour, or, Feminism Against TERFism

December 14, 2023 By: Rebecca Colesworthy

I have heard proclamations of feminism’s death many times over the years. Nevertheless, it came as a genuine surprise when I encountered it this past July, in an essay on “Sidecar,” the New Left Review blog, by NLR editor Caitlín Doherty. “A decade ago,” Doherty writes of feminism, “a generation of women—now in our late twenties and early thirties—claimed it as a primary political identity, but no longer.” Since then, Doherty argues, feminism has become not a politics so much as a style thanks...

Injurious Recipes: A Few Ingredients for a “Dangerous” Modernist Studies

September 13, 2023 By: Charles Andrews

Recently, while sifting through a long and detailed academic book contract, I found a list of items the publisher required me to exclude. A wonderful bullet point mandated that there be “no recipes or formulae or instructions” that “if followed accurately” would be “injurious to the user.” [1] I have enjoyed hearing friends’ reactions to this mandate, several of whom have asked: but, seriously, what is this referring to? Since contracts, much like syllabi, always have ground-rules based on...

It’s My Moment! Archives and Conspiracy Theories in Post-Roe America

June 29, 2023 By: Aimee Armande Wilson

We're all familiar with this scenario: a scholar spends years of her life dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge on a relatively narrow topic, and the reward for this dogged pursuit is the esteem of colleagues and mentions in specialist publications. Then, an event occurs that overlaps with the scholar’s area of expertise. This scholar’s topic now dominates the news cycle. Many would view this as cause for celebration, a chance to share their research with a broader audience. Our hypothetical...

Creative Scholarship, or Doubling Down

February 16, 2023 By: Lesley Wheeler

I’m sometimes told by people who work outside of universities that being a teacher-writer-editor in an English Department sounds great, and occasionally it is. Yet lately everything “great” about academia sounds ominous: the Great Resignation, The Great Faculty Disengagement, The Great Pause after the Great Pivot. Resignation and disengagement are paradoxical side effects of the profession’s dependence on enthusiasm—employees so dedicated and diligent that they volunteer for unpaid labor. Women...

Reading 1922, Reading 2022: Modernism, Historicism, and the Crises of Liberal World Order

May 4, 2022 By: Gabriel Hankins

How should modernists think about the current invasion of Ukraine, and the underlying crisis of liberal order, if at all, and what does that have to do with the crisis in historical thinking and legitimation in literary studies more generally? My initial claim in the following is that what we already teach and write, in this centenary of the modernist Wunderjahr 1922, has everything to do with the sudden re-entry of geopolitics into view in 2022. The modernist masterpieces of 1919–1922 were formed and contested one hundred years ago in the matrix of a crisis of liberal order, a crisis that has now returned with only slightly different names, faces, and justifications. That we cannot quite recall this is not only a gap in our understanding of modernist geopolitics, but also a more fundamental failure of historicist reason and legitimation. If we are in fact living through the repetition of certain cyclical patterns of history, ideology, and liberal-imperial order that modernists themselves diagnosed, do we still have the commitment to historicist understanding required to read those problems accurately?

How I Talk about Activism without Talking about Activism

January 6, 2022 By: Laura Hartmann-Villalta

As a scholar of modernism and the Spanish Civil War, I have long been engaged with others’ ideas about engagement—both modernists and scholars of modernism—questioning the intersection of politics and art. As a scholar at the margins of the academy, I have sought to make sense of where my own work might fit, both into the world of scholarship and the wider world in which scholarship takes shape. Now, in my new position as Director of the Engaged and Public Humanities Master’s at Georgetown...

The 2016 Project

May 26, 2021 By: Samuel Cohen

I teach American literature in the public university system of Missouri, the state whose admission to the union as a slave state caused a national crisis, the state where Dred Scott was judged to have “ no rights the white man is bound to respect,” the state where Michael Brown’s murder turned Black Lives Matter from a hashtag into a movement. My state boasts that it is the birthplace of Rush Limbaugh, who did for talk radio what Rupert Murdoch did for cable news, as well as the place that...

COVID, Commemoration, and Cultural Memory

April 22, 2021 By: Alice Kelly

In a striking moment in Joe Biden’s Inaugural Address in January 2021, the new head of state asked the nation to join him “in a moment of silent prayer to remember all those we lost this past year to the pandemic.” This was, he told the millions watching worldwide, his “first act as President.” It was a moment unprecedented in Inaugural Addresses. Biden, in both personally gracious and canny political terms, recognized the need for a moment of collective mourning and remembrance, a small act of commemoration as a necessary part of moving forward as a nation.

Dispatches of a Temporarily Embarrassed Millionaire

March 3, 2021 By: Jennie Lightweis-Goff

Is there any critical concept so abused in our political culture as “emotional labor,” a term seemingly used—like mansplain— to settle scores, to end conversation? Even now, I revise myself. Yes, “wave” language in feminism is more abused, and used to banish the radical histories that produced critique within feminism. Yes, intersectionality is conceptually abused, as a defense or elision of the conservative bona fides of women politicians from Hillary Clinton to Kamala Harris. This wandering away from context seems part of the whole: the rendering of feminism, and feminist language, as an affective and aesthetic position. A personal brand, even.

A Failure to Think Forward

January 14, 2021 By: Janine Utell

This is about failure: my own failure to think forward, my own failure to see the future. Perhaps this piece can provide an opportunity to reflect on what can emerge from individual failures as well as our field’s reckoning with its wider failures: failure to grapple with racism and white supremacy, failure to support emerging scholars, failure to intervene meaningfully in the dismantling of the university as a site of serious thought and the generation of transformative ideas.

Reading Modernism on Election Day

December 11, 2020 By: Timothy Wientzen

It’s election day in the United States. So, of course, I’m thinking about modernism.

Rummaging through E. M. Forster’s Loot

October 13, 2020 By: Cedric Van Dijck

By the time I moved to Cairo to research Forster’s years in Egypt, late in the summer of 2018, I was already familiar with his cabinet of lost artifacts and vanished statues.

Grievability, COVID-19, and the Modernists’ Pandemic

May 21, 2020 By: Elizabeth Outka

For the past five years, I have been immersed in research on the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic and the unexpected ways it weaves its way into modernism. My book on the topic came out last October, about two months before a worrisome new illness began to emerge in Wuhan, China. [1] We all want our research to be relevant, to be able to articulate the critical “so what” question we struggle to answer in grant requests and cover letters. But the sudden thrust into an actual version of the sensory and affective climate I’ve been studying for so long has been surreal and unsettling, like a B movie where an author awakes to find her work has come to life. Even as we expose troubling elisions and injustices within the works we analyze, we may still use theory as a buffer between us and the world, and the past as a shield against our present realities. When a radio program recently approached me about an interview on Viral Modernism, they said that their listeners had been overwhelmed by COVID-19 coverage and would find it comforting to hear about a pandemic safely in the distance. I understood what they meant, even if patterns of viral and human behavior threaten to make the past the present.

She Works Too Hard for the Money

April 8, 2020 By: Rebecca Colesworthy

Shortly after starting as an executive assistant in development at a nonprofit organization in 2012—my first nonacademic job following a three-year postdoctoral position—I joked to my new boss one night after everyone else had gone home that she should only hire former academics because we have no idea how not to work all the time. She laughed, as I guessed she would. Ever the court jester, I like to think I know my audience and I knew that, while not an academic herself, she could relate. We were there working late together and, from the start, I found that I could identify with the way she identified with her work.

Keyword: Pacification

January 30, 2020 By: Damien Keane

A couple of years ago, I published a book that worried the quantitative conception of information, by suggesting that “information” constituted a problem not because it lacked ways of being defined, but because it could be defined at once in so many competing and oftentimes contradictory ways. In the book, I was concerned specifically with radio broadcasting and the wartime literary field; but also, at a methodological level I was not entirely aware of until late in the composition process, with how forms of mediation and needs for remediation had created conditions in which the political charge of description and classification was suddenly, if also temporarily, to the fore. I tried to get at how this seemingly primary issue of definition is, in fact, the product of acts of and disputes about classification through which the “data of culture,” in Lisa Gitelman’s phrase, are put into meaningful sequences and mobilized, used, and managed—a in short, how they are put in formation. [1]

Modernism, Eco-anxiety, and the Climate Crisis

November 21, 2019 By: Anne Raine

When In These Times launched in early 2017, it gave voice to a collective sense of shock, a need to connect scholarship with activism and “engage, engage, engage.” Since then, contributors have offered a range of thoughtful reflections on how to study and teach modernism and modernity in these catastrophic times. But until recently the forum has been unsettlingly silent on the climate crisis—even as temperatures and sea levels continue to rise, record-breaking floods and wildfires proliferate, droughts threaten crops and ecosystems, glaciers continue to melt and coral reefs to bleach, and a million animal and plant species face extinction at heartbreakingly accelerated rates.

Aesthetic Education for the Anthropocene

August 27, 2019 By: Thomas S. Davis

Austral summer on the Antarctic Peninsula. Eight of us climb out of our zodiac onto the shore of Petermann Island. This place dazzles and overwhelms the senses. The luminous blue icebergs, granite streaked pink with penguin guano, the weakly green cryoplankton spread across the snow. Antarctica is not the white continent of popular imagination. And it isn’t quiet either. The plangent groans of glaciers crawl across the landscape, reverberating through our bodies. Gentoo penguins squawk atop their stone nests, staring helplessly skyward at the skuas eying their young. We are unwelcome, unneeded guests.

Joyce & the Dems: Ulysses, Politics, and Cultural Capital

April 29, 2019 By: Jonathan Goldman

“We are still learning to be Joyce's contemporaries,” intones Richard Ellmann, the first words of his James Joyce, published in 1959. [1] Sixty years later, Joyce’s most famous book (and second-hardest to read) has become a talking point and prop of two Democrat candidates in the race for the US presidential nomination. Ulysses, over a century since avant-garde magazines started publishing it serially, has been seen trending on Twitter. Have we, have the United States, caught up to Joyce?

Looking Backward on a Strike

March 10, 2019 By: Megan Faragher

When the cold January turned to an even colder February, I would have loved nothing more than to begin teaching Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward as part of my class on twentieth-century utopian literature. But instead of going to class, I put on my wool socks, three layers of clothes, a winter coat, and snow boots to spend hours standing in the frigid Midwestern climes outside the main entrance of my university, sign in my hands, equal parts exasperation and anxiety in my heart. My colleagues and I were one week into what would end up being the longest faculty strike in the state of Ohio and the second-longest in the history of public higher education in the United States. As I prepared for the chill air and tear-inducing winds, I registered the ironic contrast between the day that was meant to be and the day that was. It turned out that the very question that had led me to formulate the utopian literature class—what possible value utopias can offer us in these troubled, uncertain, undoubtedly dystopian times—had become even more starkly personal than I could have ever imagined. Standing in the cold I recognized that if modernist utopian literature meant to push us towards radical changes that could counter an increasingly broken society, this current strike was going to force us to recognize what those changes might be. What, in fact, are our aspirational politics in higher education in these times and how, practically, do our actions push that agenda forward.

American Memory, Forgotten Wars

November 2, 2018 By: Patrick Deer

November 2018 not only sees the US midterm elections which will allow the American people to respond at the ballot box to the tumultuous and often exhaustingly toxic political environment during the Trump presidency. It also brings the less heralded and seemingly more distant centenary commemorations of the end of the First World War on November 11th, 1918. Yet another world historical milestone to be overshadowed by a relentless domestic news cycle dominated by a politics of distraction and fear that seems to harness racism, misogyny, economic inequality and outright violence to an unprecedented degree.

The Quantified Self

July 7, 2018 By: Lisa Mendelman

The information superhighway is paved with good intentions. This thought occurred to me earlier this summer, as I drove the Silicon Valley corridor of 101. “The first survivor of Alzheimer’s is out there,” one billboard declared. “Hello marijuana, goodbye anxiety,” announced a second (the company, Eaze, hand-delivers the substance, à la Instacart). “No data left behind,” avowed a third. Perhaps because I was headed to the ALA to deliver a paper on Edith Wharton’s satire of interwar scientific culture, Twilight Sleep, the third struck me as particularly ludicrous and problematic.

In Search of Lost Time: Precarious Research in the UK

June 18, 2018 By: Séan Richardson

On a recent episode of the Modernist Podcast, I asked “What does precarity mean to you?” My inquiry came in the wake of the strike action that swept the UK in the early months of 2018, as academics became embroiled in an all too familiar fight to protect their working conditions by halting alterations that would see sweeping changes to pensions. I have returned to this question many times since and realized how flawed it is, for precarity is not an epistemological issue, but an ontological one.

Auburn Prison and Carceral Modernity: A Performance History

January 31, 2018 By: Nick Fesette

Originally constructed in 1817, Auburn Correctional Facility in Upstate New York stands as the oldest continually functional maximum-security penitentiary in the United States. [1] I doubt that its designers would have predicted that 200 years later the US would come to incarcerate more people than any other country in history. We currently make up only 5% of the world’s population, but confine about 21% of its prisoners.

Sign of the Belated Times

November 20, 2017 By: David Farley

Modernism has always been bound up for me with travel, with politics, and with protest. I got my first passport and traveled to what was then the Soviet Union in January of 1987. It was the dead of winter and the twilight of the Cold War when we visited Moscow, Leningrad, and the Central Asian Republic of Uzbekistan, where the calligraphic beauty of the Islamic design on the madrassahs in Samarkand echoed the ornate beauty of St Basil’s Cathedral back in Moscow. When I returned home, I read for the first time the Anglophone modernist writers whose obscure and difficult texts spoke to the shock of international travel that had resonated so strongly with me.

Modernist Memories of Fascism: Women’s Writing in the Age of Trump

September 28, 2017 By: Julie Vandivere

As a scholar of early-twentieth-century literature, I have not found it necessary to address contemporary political issues in my work. However, the election of Donald Trump has forced me to change my thoughts about writing in general and more specifically, about publishing on modernist women writers. In the present academic climate, many who read and teach in the perpetually unpopular field of women writers also contend with heavy teaching loads, difficult family commitments and/or precarious employment.

The Limits of Resistance

July 4, 2017 By: Benjamin Tausig

No single word has signaled a repulsion toward Donald Trump—and the impulse to respond to him—like “resistance.” The term emerged immediately after the election, as soon as November 11th (The Advocate: “Count us as part of ‘the resistance’”), 10th (Charles Blow: “Count me among the resistance”), and 9th (Ben Jealous: “The resistance begins today”). One Facebook page, for a group called “Portland’s Resistance,” was launched on the 8th. This last one, presumably created to rechannel a late-night panic, captures something especially visceral. And indeed, it seems that no one ever announced that “resistance” would be the keyword of a new political mobilization. Hillary Clinton did not use the word in her concession speech. There was no massively viral John Oliver clip. Rather, the word seemed to lend itself so well to the coming crisis that, like certain scientific discoveries, it occurred to multiple people independently. Something in the water made its adoption logical.

Modernism Ungoverned

March 2, 2017 By: Julie Beth Napolin

For the first time in 7 years, I am not teaching full-time. I’m on sabbatical. The morning after the election, there was no place I was supposed to be other than working on my book. I didn’t have to face a classroom and try to digest the election with students, nor did I have to convince them that our conversations were politically relevant. I didn’t have to get my kids off to school and move on with everyday life (I don’t have kids). It was like Johnny Rotten staring cross-eyed into the camera, “noooooo future.” It was just me.

Echoes of Fascism

February 10, 2017 By: Kate Macdonald

In January I was teaching speculative and science fiction from the modernist period to show my students how fascism emerges, and how to recognise the ways that literary strategies can instil alienation, fear of the Other, and anti-Semitism and racism. My students were German, and our seminars were held in the north-west German university town of Paderborn, a little east of the Ruhr, where a British Army base

Late to the Party

February 7, 2017 By: Melissa Dinsman

In his insightful contribution to “In These Times,” James Gifford takes inspiration from Woolf to state that on or about November 2016 something fundamentally changed (or rather should fundamentally change) in our teaching of modernist studies. That the election marks a shifting moment in the ways in which we, as pedagogues, approach modern literature is a thought-provoking claim

On or About November 2016, Modernist Studies Changed

February 3, 2017 By: James Gifford

On November 9th, 2016, I was teaching my last class on Hemingway’s in our time. I had only one North American student in the room, and everyone was silent. It was silence of a kind that my neighbourhood, even deep in the night, never finds.

Print Plus Exclusive

Humanities to the Rescue: A Militant Editorial Project

May 8, 2024 By: David R. Castillo

Volume 8 Cycle 3

Tags:

technology information

The deterioration of the information environment in our age of inflationary media has precipitated a crisis of reality: any sort of baseline for what we take to be “facts” no longer exists. Evidence-based information is routinely drowned in a media market that rewards the loudest and most strident voices at the expense of truth and the common good. The powerful AIs employed by social media giants like Facebook (now Meta), Twitter (now X), YouTube, and TikTok have been trained to generate the most engagement from global users, with little or no regard for information integrity, including in vital areas of public interest. What industry insiders call “personalized amplification” is an AI-driven efficiency model that uses our own biases as hooks to keep us glued to the screen. We can curate our world through a combination of artificially augmented reality (promoting media feeds that reinforce our beliefs) and diminished reality (limiting exposure to inconvenient information that may call those beliefs into question).

In this context, reality itself has become a consumer good, a product to be bought and sold in the marketplace. The result has been a deadly devolution of the language of democracy. As historian Yuval Harari and former tech industry insiders Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin warned at the time that Generative AI entered the media market with the release of OpenAI ChatGPT: “The specter of being trapped in a world of illusions has haunted humankind much longer than the specter of A.I. Soon we will finally come face to face with Descartes’s demon, with Plato’s cave, with the Buddhist Maya. A curtain of illusions could descend over the whole of humanity, and we might never again be able to tear that curtain away—or even realize it is there. . . . Democracy is a conversation, conversation relies on language, and when language itself is hacked the conversation breaks down and democracy becomes untenable.” As if on cue, OpenAI the company behind the release of ChatGPT has since been looking into developing new features that will presumably allow users to customize their version of the technology based on their personal “AI values” and political orientation, even as their own developers realize that such tools are likely to result in “sycophantic A.I.s that mindlessly amplify people’s existing beliefs.”[1]

Given this situation, how surprised should we really be when we witness the unprecedented rise in polarization, divisiveness, and authoritarian language (and actions) in countries that not so long ago were thought of as stable democracies? Is there a solution to this “infocalypse,” as Nina Schick called it in her prescient Deep Fakes: The Coming Infocalypse (2021)? While red-flagging initiatives such as deepfake detection tools and other debunking mechanisms are clearly important and necessary, the availability of cheap, highly sophisticated generative AI technologies makes it increasingly difficult to stay ahead of scammers and cynical opportunists, let alone deal effectively with disinformation campaigns run by demagogues and other attention merchants in what seems like an unending game of whack-a-mole.

As I see it, the real game changer is not going to come from reactive debunking technologies but from proactive “prebunking” training, the kind of reality literacy approach that the humanities can provide. This is the recognition that inspired much of my public humanities activism as UB Humanities Institute Director (2016-2021), as well as my current work as founding co-Director of the UB Center for Information Integrity, including targeted community conversations, collaborative publications, and editorial projects, starting with Medialogies: Reading Reality in the Age of Inflationary Media (2016), which I co-wrote with William Egginton.

Full disclosure: I am a Cervantes specialist who looks at the toxic effects of mis- and dis-information from the vantage point of an earlier age of inflationary media, which caused a similar crisis of reality back in the early modern period, with all kinds of fake and manipulative news circulating in printed form, including state-sponsored disinformation campaigns. In Imperial Spain, for example, the monarchy supported a “royal chronicler” office tasked with the rewriting of history from a properly Catholic/patriotic/monarchical perspective to justify policies that discriminated against and ultimately criminalized religious and cultural minorities, including “new Christians” of Muslim and Jewish heritage. The new disinformation-filled monarchical “histories” and the conspiracy theories spread by “yellow journalism” would play a crucial role in fomenting discriminatory practices and mass deportations, including the expulsion of more than 300,000 Moriscos between 1609 and 1614, known at the time as “the final solution.”[2] Such policies and practices were officially defended as necessary means to ensure the security and integrity of the true Spanish nation (meaning Catholic and monarchical): Make Spain Great Again!

Cervantes would include poignant references to the morisco mass exile in Don Quixote II (1615) and Persiles (1617) and would ridicule the ideology of racial purity that led to discriminatory policies against Jewish converts in his short satirical piece El retablo de las maravillas (The Wondrous Tableau, 1615). His ironizing strategy would be familiar to fans of the Borat films and The Colbert Report, consisting of nearly mimetic repetitions of xenophobic and racist language with just the right kind of humorous modulation to reveal its nonsense. More generally, Cervantes was deeply concerned about the manipulating potential of the new media of his time, including such mass spectacles as the wildly popular Comedia Nueva championed by Lope de Vega and his followers. His response was to urge his “discreet,” “prudent,” “judicial,” “discerning” readers to examine closely, critically (“despacio”) what was coming at them too fast to make sense of it. This is arguably the common thread of much of Cervantes’s work, including his collection of plays and interludes Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses nuevos nunca representados (1615), which were directed to a reading public rather than a live audience.

As I have been arguing for decades now, Cervantes’s writings offer a model of humanistic pedagogy and activism that teaches us to press the pause button to examine not just the content but the form of manipulative messages in their multilayered contexts. If a central goal of the humanities classroom is to help students read critically and think outside the box, the key Cervantine insight is that we must teach them to see the box first. This is a point Egginton and I have made more recently in What Would Cervantes Do? (2022), as we redeploy Cervantes’s lessons in critical reading to promote reality literacy in our own age of inflationary media and disinformation. This is also a central goal of two of my forthcoming projects, the co-edited essay collections Anti-Disinformation Pedagogies and Truth Seeking in our Age of (Mis)Information Overload.

This last volume is the latest offering of the SUNY Press book series Humanities to the Rescue, which I founded in 2018 during my tenure as UB Humanities Institute Director. As a collaboration between STEM field experts, social scientists and scholars working in traditional humanistic fields, including English, Romance Languages, Comparative Literature, Art, and Media Studies, Truth Seeking in Our Age of (Mis)Information Overload rehearses a convergence (all-hands-on-deck) approach to the existential challenge of mis- and dis-information with a focus on understanding the role of Artificial Intelligence as an accelerant and the need to cultivate critical awareness and develop more effective strategies of science communication in such vital areas as public health and climate change to build trust in collaboration with local community partners.

Book cover — Fig. 1. Cover, David R. Castillo, Siwei Lyu, Christina Milletti, and Cynthia Stewart, eds., *Truth Seeking in Our Age of (Mis)Information Overload* (Albany: SUNY Press, 2024).

As a joint venture between the UB Humanities Institute and the UB Center for Information Integrity, Truth Seeking in Our Age of (Mis)Information Overload speaks most directly to subjects in science, mathematics, and technology, albeit with a distinctive humanistic framing.

The other three volumes of the Humanities to the Rescue book series published to date, while interdisciplinary in scope, are anchored in traditional humanities subjects such as literature, cultural studies, critical theory, history, philosophy, art, and music.

Given such varied repertoire of subjects and fields, what lends the Humanities to the Rescue book series coherence as an editorial project is its in-your-face militancy, born out of a firm belief in the essential value of humanistic disciplines and the need to reinvest in all of them as a matter of human survival. With so much pressure building on humanists to “defend” themselves and explain the value of their disciplines in utilitarian terms narrowly defined by the incentive structures of the market society, administrators of multidisciplinary centers and (journal and book series) editors could and should play a role in reminding us all that the question most worth asking is not what can our communities do to help the humanities? but what can the humanities do to help our communities? This is ultimately the conviction behind my activist approach to editorial politics, which grew out of the community engagement projects that our Humanities Institute team (and now the Center for Information Integrity) has been organizing, fostering, and supporting for over a decade, in collaboration with Humanities NY and a host of local partners in the Buffalo area.

As I see it, in the current sociocultural environment dominated by attention merchants who trade in misinformation and divisiveness, humanities editors have an opportunity (and a responsibility) to support “activist” awareness-raising projects and help seed informational resilience in our communities. As an example, the second volume of our series, Resonances Against Fascism (2024), edited by Laura Chiesa, mobilizes modernist and avant-garde studies, critical and cultural theory, musicology and sound studies, critical race and gender studies, performance studies, and philosophy to address the urgencies of the present, from perspectives attentive to the distinctive anti-authoritarian echoes audible in the works of Kurt Weill, Nina Simone, Chico Buarque, Marguerite Duras, Jean-Luc Godard, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, and the coral chants of the Black Lives Matter Movement.

I remain convinced (today more than ever) that coming to grips with the current crisis of democracy and the rise of authoritarianism in the United States and abroad will require a collective reinvestment in community conversations, dialectical inquiry, public ethics, critical thinking, and political imagination; more humanities, in other words, sharpened for the existential challenges of our time. Speaking at the inaugural 2018 “Humanities to the Rescue” event series that inspired the eponymous editorial project, Margaret Atwood urged her audience to revisit historically humanistic questions as we ponder the future we would want to inhabit: “Here is a question that is at the core of the humanities: Where and how do we want to live? Is it in a society that strives to right ancient wrongs, to search for balance and equality, and to respect truth and fairness, or do we want to live in some other place in some other way? It will be up to you to decide that, to question values, to explore the nature of truth and fairness. It will be up to you to understand the stories and to create better ones.”[3] These are in fact the driving questions and central quest of the Humanities to the Rescue editorial project, richly illustrated by the third book of the series, Utopian Imaginings: Saving the Future in the Present (2024), edited by Victoria Wolcott, a volume steeped in hope that examines alternative paths for the present and the future, while vindicating the utopian potential of the humanities classroom.

Notes

[1] "How should AI systems behave, and who should decide?" OpenAI, February 23, 2023.

[2] David Castillo, “Dis-Info Ops and Strategies of Resistance from Another Age of Inflationary Media,” Anti-disinformation Pedagogies, ed. David Castillo and Bradley Nelson (Minneapolis: Hispanic Issues Online Book Series, 2024).

[3] Julia Beck, “During Speech at UB, Atwood Stresses the Importance of the Humanities,” Buffalo News, 19 March 2018.