UB Humanities Festival to explore utopia – UB Now: News and views for UB faculty and staff – University at Buffalo Reporter

The UB Humanities Institute (HI) will present its 2021 Humanities Festival this weekend at Silo City. The free, two-day event Sept. 18 and 19 features speakers, panels and community conversations dedicated to exploring ideas addressing the theme of Utopia.

Utopia is a place of the imagination. Its an ideal that can embody a goal. If theres a whiff of impracticality in the words contemporary usage, the thematic utopia of the festival rings with distinct overtones of possibility. Utopianism is the first step in imagining better, more equitable futures, a conversation that brings communities together to affirm environmental and social justice, according to festival organizers.

In many cases, utopianism is about roads not taken; its about roads that may have emerged, but were never traveled, says David Castillo, HI director and UB professor of Romance languages and literatures, College of Arts and Sciences.

A complete schedule of festival sessions is available online.Guests are asked to register beforehand, but registration can be done on site on either day.

Since its founding in 2005, UBs Humanities Institute has established itself as one of the most important entities supporting the humanities in Western New York. The 2021 Humanities Festival is presented in collaboration with the HIs regional partners: SUNY Buffalo State, Canisius College, Niagara University and Daemen College.

Castillo says this years festival, with its utopian theme, arrives as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to ricochet off current cultural, political and societal environments, further amplifying already overplayed dystopian themes.

That apocalyptic saturation has created a crisis of the imagination that has contributed to a clipped vision of the future. Better alternatives to the current historical moment have been cropped from that image.

If we dont reclaim ownership of our situation and imagine new futures, then we surrender to our existing destructive inertia, he says. We need to start over, and starting over begins with imagining new narratives. Thats what well be doing during the festival.

Its no coincidence that Silo City will host this years Humanities Festival. Organizers specifically chose the site for its symbolic power. Silo City speaks to the festivals theme and demonstrates how utopian conversations can take shape and effect change, according to Christina Milletti, associate professor in UBs English department and the HIs executive director.

Silo City itself is a transformative space and an ideal location for transformative thinking, says Milletti. The pandemic obliged us to re-imagine the festivals shape and structure, so it seemed an apt moment to also move the event to a site where imagination is visible as a tangible landscape. Silo City has evolved from a space of thriving industry and subsequent rust belt decay and is now reemerging as a thriving cultural and ecological community space populated by artists, homes and businesses surrounded by an innovative natural habitat.

Silo Citys historical legacy has been repurposed into a new modern reality that considers both people and the environment, she says. It represents the possible, the realization of imagination as a new future.

Millettis research and writing interests include contemporary fiction and narratives. With several UB colleagues, shell be part of a panel that considers how fiction regularly influences the real world. In this moment, when fraudulent narratives increasingly exert magnetism over public discourse, our panel will speculate how the power of fiction offers paths of resistance over spin, propaganda, alternative facts, imposture and doublespeak.

The festival opens at 1 p.m. on Saturday with a discussion of the legacies of utopian movements in New York State. Thats followed by a presentation on Ritual and Place: Towards a Utopian Policy. The Power of Fiction panel comes afterward; then a presentation on Walt Whitmans Calamus, a daring, sometimes utopian, sequence of poems about camaraderie, friendship and love, and how that love can save American democracy.

Sunday begins with a session from Dalia Antonia Caraballo Muller, UB associate professor of history, and three UB undergraduate students called The Impossible Project: The Truly Inclusive Classroom. Muller is the projects founder. The Impossible Project is an innovative learning practice that prepares students to take on social justice challenges.

All the festival sessions serve to illustrate how the humanities are a natural platform for critical inquiry and imagination, while the Humanities Institute in particular provides a bridge for that inquiry between the university and the surrounding community, according to Milletti.

We invite our communities to join us at the Humanities Festival this weekend to imagine socially and environmentally just futures, she says. Lets start a conversation together.

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UB Humanities Festival to explore utopia - UB Now: News and views for UB faculty and staff - University at Buffalo Reporter