This article examines not only who is recognized as legitimate within historical narratives but also how the very standards of historical validity have shifted over time. It was sparked by a question that interrupted an otherwise ordinary lecture: “What does that have to do with history?” Asked during a discussion of the Stonewall uprising, the question did more than challenge a specific topic; it unsettled deeper assumptions about what counts as historical knowledge and who has the authority to define it. Rather than dismissing the moment, I treat it as an opportunity to reflect on the fragile boundaries of the discipline and the political forces that shape them. Drawing on memory studies and historiographical debates—from E. H. Carr and Carl Becker to Elizabeth Jelin—I discuss how mainstream accounts and public policies determine which lives are archived and which remain marginal. In light of recent US executive actions seeking to restrict how history is taught, the classroom has become a contested space where perspectives can be fostered or silenced. I argue that teaching history responsibly means confronting uncomfortable pasts, embracing intellectual friction, and recognizing that students themselves participate in history’s ongoing construction.

Adaptation has been embedded into Homer’s Odyssey since its origins in the oral traditions of ancient Greece. With each new age, creative artists find fresh ways to re-tell the story of the poem’s world and its protagonist—who is himself known for his adaptability—recasting his adventures and quest for home in ways that speak to the concerns of the contemporaneous moment. The range of these adaptations has been vast, with the epic being appropriated sometimes for diametrically opposed purposes: in support of imperialism or to contest it; as a vehicle for patriarchal dominance or feminist autonomy; as a narrative in support of refugees or condemning the indigenous inhabitants of certain lands. Some of these works have themselves become foundational, inspiring stories and genres in their turn, and with the imminent release of Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation, we have a new chance to see what the Odyssey might be in our current moment.

Based on the past year’s traffic stats to the Humanities Indicators web site, the submitted article takes a question-based approach to answer what Americans seem most interested in learning about the humanities. Using infographics and short summary paragraphs, the report walks through key data points about the current state of the humanities using the most recent available data from the federal government or surveys conducted by the project.

This article explores how predictions about future nanotechnological and neuropharmaceutical applications to medicine further anti-ageing discourse in the present. Products of both research areas enable physiological augmentation, with uses way beyond accepted traditional goals of medicine. But most “nanodreams” have not come to fruition, yet; as such, much popular scientific writing about nanotechnology is “thoroughly science-fictional” in how it imagines its future. Projections about these technologies contribute to devaluing the ageing experience and neglecting the need to address challenges of ageing in the present. To make these points, this article will read two speculative texts alongside one another: a piece of creative science fiction and a predictive popular science account. Ray Kurzweil’s How to Create a Mind propagates brain–computer interfaces, and Jeffrey Moore’s The Memory Artists deals with neuropharmaceuticals. Such parallel reading risks conflating different genres, narrative forms and contexts, obfuscating the purpose and possibilities of either genre. But it helps illustrate how ideas of an augmented human species have begun structuring social belief systems that shine through creative writing that joins in pitching, rather than effectively critiquing, these technologies as holding the fountain of youth.

At stake in the Gaza genocide is the world itself. To grasp just how “worldly” the stakes are, all we need to do is face the single most distinct feature of this genocide: its prosecution as a genocide necessary for the global order at all costs—even at the cost of the order itself. In its insistence on the genocide, the west has cannibalized the very institutions it had used to shape the world. How, then, do we explain the radical necessity of genocide here? Here, I argue that we need to come to terms with how, since the 1970s at least, Zionism has co-constituted the object we call western civilization. And it has done so primarily by operating as a geopolitical and ideological impasse to decolonization. Zionism is the west’s postcolonial alibi, deferring any reckoning with the west’s colonial history and enduring racial regimes. But the genocide at once reaffirms and destabilizes Zionism’s vocation. Intersecting with the irreversible decline of US empire, the genocide appears as the death knell for an entire age, accelerating the effective unraveling of the international order that stands in for the world, and potentially heralding a kind of unworlding.

Today’s landscape of public archaeology foregrounds intentional practices, ensuring that archaeologists are aware of our actions and their repercussions. While we are intentional in our planning and implementation of public projects, this article argues that we are not adequately prepared for ending them. Many projects die for various reasons, get passed on to new generations of practitioners, and some simply come to a natural ending. A lack of discussion around project death, however, leads to unintentional endings or confusing continuities. Public archaeology is an intense emotional experience, and feelings of betrayal can emerge when a practitioner or the community partner exits the partnership unexpectedly. This article explores these issues from the perspective of an American scholar at a small public university and asks what an intentional ending to a public archaeology project looks like. It also asks how we can co-create and co-manage such an intentional ending with our community partners. Rather than fear the death of a project, there may be power in embracing the grief of ending a collaboration and soothing the emotional rupture. Finally, it concludes by suggesting that a rite of passage or celebration of the end may be necessary to mark the project as complete, allowing the partners to mourn and move on.

Generative A.I. deepfake images, videos, and other content, overtaking social media apps and other digital content, commonly referred to as A.I. slop, are creating a media ecosystem defined by content chaos. The decisions of big tech companies to program algorithms that favor, and reward in monetary terms, overly emotionally triggering material continue to amplify information pollution. As a climate media scholar, the author argues that popularizing information pollution terminology, which labels generative A.I. slop as contaminating social media apps and platforms, would focus attention on the social and political harms. This content fuels disinformation campaigns and is diminishing public trust. In addition, labeling A.I. slop with a pollution metaphor brings into the lens more readily the environmental harms of generative artificial intelligence. Examples discussed include the cratered monetary value of AI-generated art, the A.I. agent-only social network Moltbook, misinformation and disinformation following extreme weather disasters, and a creative direct action by anti-data center activists in Quilicura, Chile.

Animation is still a young art form with many under-explored avenues of expression. Although the lay person’s view of animation is still predominantly that of entertainment on screens, it can also exist as participatory sculpture, paintings in motion, live performance visuals, and experiences of exploration and discovery. Such artworks challenge us to rethink what animation is and how it can engage people. As an artist, I draw on all of this and more through works based on one of the keystones of animation—the zoetrope, or “wheel of life.”

This article examines mudlarking, the practice of searching urban and coastal foreshores for historical objects, as a form of participatory archaeology that reveals how material, temporal, and social boundaries are continually negotiated. Using the concept of liminality as a theoretical lens, this article explores how mudlarking unsettles distinctions between land and water, past and present, and formal and informal knowledge, generating new ways of engaging with heritage in Aotearoa New Zealand and abroad. Drawing on material culture theory, this article demonstrates how found objects serve as sites of social construction, where value and meaning shift through interpretation and context. By situating mudlarking within global and local frameworks of heritage governance, this article highlights tensions between protection, participation, and authority. Through comparative discussion of practices and policies—from the Portable Antiquities Scheme in England and Wales to heritage legislation in Aotearoa New Zealand—it is argued that mudlarking exemplifies a radical encounter between archaeology, community, and environment. This study reveals how everyday engagements with the material past can transform understandings of heritage and invite more inclusive, adaptive, and relational modes of environmental knowledge-making.

I introduce three essays arising from a literature-and-science roundtable on forest ecology and engagement, linking the essays particularly through their delineation of the varieties of disciplinary attention and their extension of community beyond the human. Some further lines of investigation, prompted by but moving beyond the immediate topics of the essays, are offered. Artisanal making is put forward as a third pole of environmental ethics and sustainability discourse to balance inputs from science and the humanities.

What is access and how has accessibility—as a perceptual frame, a discourse, a box to check, and a relationship—infiltrated our everyday lives and become a means for adjudicating whether we live in inhabitable worlds in India and internationally? This article draws from a roundtable discussion at a 2024 disability studies and disability justice conference held in Kolkata, India, as well as interviews and participant observation conducted with disabled Indians to explore the meanings of access and to think about alternative concepts or frameworks that are used instead.

Contemporary scholarship rarely questions the expectation of gratitude in asymmetrical relationships, such as those between institutional structures and persons with disabilities, where refusal is difficult. This dynamic organises dependence and constrains choice in the Indian context, where access to education, welfare, and institutional accommodation is often contingent, negotiated, and unevenly realised. From the perspective of moral economy, affect theory, and disability studies, gratitude operates as a form of moral governance, not through overt coercion but through affective compliance. It is not simply expressed as a voluntary emotion but rather as a social performance, read as evidence of deservingness. This demand is not uniformly distributed; rather, its intensity flows through the faultlines of caste, class, gender, and religion such that the capacity to withhold gratitude is itself structured by power. This article argues that when gratitude lies not in its presence but in its necessity, and when appreciation becomes a condition of access, gratitude ceases to be a virtue and instead functions as the quiet consolidation of inequality.

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a serious and urgent global health challenge that is often presented as a war on “superbugs.” The implicit message is that certain pathogenic microbes should be eliminated. With a focus on AMR innovation, I explain how microbes have been relegated to an abstract notion of property that may be controlled, manipulated, and owned. In this context, the treatment of microbes merely as an exploitable resource renders redundant ecological evaluation since only anthropocentric needs matter. Drawing on insights and concepts from the humanities and social sciences, I explain what ecological equity means when microbes are recognised to have moral value, creative agency, and situated knowledge. By this view, the patent system becomes inherently unfair because it neither considers nor rewards the inventive contributions of microbes. It also does not consider the ecological impact that an invention may have. Social institutions (like patent systems) that apply to AMR innovation must shift away from the human–nonhuman divide and adopt an ecological or biocentric approach to allow both human and microbial environments to flourish. I argue that the attribution of rights to microbes not only helps to realise this end but also enables conceptual cross-pollination across law, the humanities, and social sciences and steers the “greening” of legal regimes that apply to AMR innovation.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its project of Indian Knowledge System (IKS) have been trying to cast a sanitized and monolithic understanding of Indian culture, centered on high-caste Vedic Hinduism. In the name of curricular and pedagogical innovations, BJP is promoting myths as realities, pseudo-sciences as sciences, and erasing selective histories. This article elaborates on how the idea of “Indian tradition” is being distorted, fictionalized, and cherry-picked to align it with the high-caste Hindu ideological foundations of the BJP. Such an approach has generated problematic frameworks of sanitized knowledge-making mechanisms. The article also proposes that the Plural Knowledge Systems of India can be considered an alternative knowledge system to address the challenges posed by the IKS.

Much of Western philosophy has treated the ability to reason as both the defining feature of human nature and also the condition of knowledge. Even when philosophers attempt to expose reason’s finitude, the very form of argument simply bolsters the authority it seeks to constrain. Philosophy cannot fully displace rationality when it presupposes rigid standards of justification. But literature works differently: because it does not need to defend itself through argument, it can effectively reveal the limits of rationality. By examining the philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Foucault, Nietzsche, and Cavell together with the literary works Goethe’s Faust and Shelley’s Frankenstein, this article argues that literary work critiques rationality in ways philosophical discourse cannot.

As Lucy Grace writes, “Our lives are a bundle of stories.”1 In fact, even the self, that seemingly solid and continuous “I” we carry through the world, is a story, a narrative we construct and reconstruct by piecing together memories and experiences into what feels like, as Guy Saunders writes, “a single unified self.”2 We are thus all storytellers at heart, and the story we are most often telling, retelling, and revising is ourselves. As cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett argues in Consciousness Explained, our selves are “magnificent fictions,” not “independently existing soul-pearls” but “artifacts of the social processes that create us.”3 We do not discover who we are; we narrate ourselves into being.

Water insecurity is a persistent challenge in many American Indian and Alaska Native communities, where access to safe, reliable, and culturally relevant water sources is shaped by historical displacement, infrastructure neglect, and environmental degradation. Addressing these longstanding inequalities calls for more equitable, relationship-based, and decolonial approaches to community engagement and collaboration. Our reflexive essay examines how collaborative, Indigenous-centered research practices can strengthen water security efforts in Tribal communities. Using a reflexive qualitative approach grounded in Indigenous Research Methodologies, we analyzed how relationality, ethical engagement, and attention to Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) shaped our team’s research practices and partnerships with Tribal communities. Reflexive and culturally grounded approaches strengthened trust, collaboration, and accountability between researchers and community partners. Integrating IKS with western science research and water justice approaches improved the cultural relevance of the work and supported community-driven, sustainable outcomes. Our experience suggests that water security research is strengthened when it is grounded in relationality, deep listening, and respect for Tribal sovereignty. These findings support the development of ethical, collaborative, and culturally responsive research and policy approaches to water security in Tribal communities.

This article reexamines the Harlem Renaissance by emphasizing Florida’s crucial yet often overlooked contribution to its development. Focusing on influential figures like Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, and Augusta Savage—whose lives and work exemplify Florida’s impact—the study explores how Florida’s Black communities served as both catalysts and sustainers of the movement’s creative and cultural legacy. Using a multidisciplinary approach that combines archival research, visual art analysis, and regional cultural history, the narrative demonstrates that Florida was more than a peripheral region; it was a vibrant hub for artistic innovation and intellectual exchange. Through the recounting of two curated exhibits, the authors highlight Florida’s rich cultural landscape by showcasing artworks, manuscripts, and oral histories that emphasize regional storytelling’s influence on national and global Black cultural movements. By tracing migration patterns, community resilience, and artistic networks, this work reveals how Florida’s Black towns fostered resilience amid systemic oppression, producing key figures who shaped Harlem’s legacy while cultivating a distinctive regional identity. This investigation underscores the importance of reclaiming regional histories to deepen the broader story of Black art and culture. It also highlights implications for contemporary efforts in cultural preservation, community empowerment, and representation. Ultimately, this article affirms Florida’s integral role in the ongoing narrative of Black cultural renaissance and innovation.