Events

[FESTIVAL] Somewhere between an arts festival and an academic conference, the fifth annual Humanities Festival offers a weekend of talks, panels, and performances around the theme of Revolution. Undertaken by UB’s Humanities Institute, the festival aims to bring their mission off the campus and into the community with a schedule that kicks off on Thursday at the Buffalo Central Library. Safiya Umoja Noble (author of Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism) and Siva Vaidhyanathan (author of Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy) will lead a discussion on social media and its complicated and sometimes deleterious impact on democracy. On Friday, the festival’s keynote speaker and author of the best-selling young adult novel The Hate U Give that explored the American phenomenon of police shootings of unarmed people of color, Angie Thomas will give a talk about turning the personal into activism at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. And Saturday’s schedule across the street in Rockwell Hall runs a gamut of hot-button social issues facing down the country headed into a decisive midterm election including #metoo, climate justice, the state of Buffalo at its current crossroads, with poetry and a performance of Dan Hoyle’s “journalistic theater” piece Border People. Tickets can be purchased for the entire weekend or a la carte for individual events through at buffalohumanities.org.