Note: For the Record, formerly People in the News, is a weekly digest of achievements by faculty, students and staff.
Saladdin Ahmed, visiting professor of Modern Languages and Literatures, has published a book, Revolutionary Hope after Nihilism: Marginalized Voices and Dissent (Bloomsbury Academic) in hardcover and digital format. Saurabh Dube, distinguished professor-researcher in the Centre of Asian and African Studies at the College of Mexico, writes, “In this challenging and courageous book, Saladdin Ahmed thinks through the terms and textures of ‘negation.’ He acutely interrogates thereby collective contemporary crises, global and planetary. Via a reinvigorated post-nihilism, the work articulates formations of critical solidarity with marginal subjects while unframing fascism as an ‘ideology form.’ Such formidable conviction is rare in our present.” In a blurb, Zahi Zalouha, professor of philosophy and literature at Whitman College writes, “this book offers a bold vision for a transformative politics that passes through the hopelessness of the present situation. Declining the liberal reformist agenda (a better world imaginable only from within the existing realm of possibilities) and the defeatist attitude (nothing can overcome global capitalism), Ahmed calls for an exit from the current state of affairs via an inventive reinvention of cosmopolitanism.” More information on the book can be accessed here.
Carol Weisse, Ronald M. Obenzinger Professor of Psychology and Director of Health Professions; traveled with collaborators Kelly Melekis, chair of social work at Skidmore College; and Leah Rohlfsen, chair of sociology at St. Lawrence University, to two rural counties in Upstate New York to meet with community leaders operating residential care homes serving hospice patients. The trip was supported by a seed grant from the New York Six (NY6) Liberal Arts Consortium to develop a new cross-institutional community-based research course on end-of-life care. Accessing hospice care can be particularly challenging for terminally ill individuals living in rural communities, especially for patients with home insecurity and caregiver instability. In several counties in Upstate N.Y., community leaders operate non-profit, non-medical homes that train volunteers to take on the role of surrogate family members so that terminally ill individuals can spend their final days in a caring, safe home setting. These homes provide a critical service to their communities, but they also offer a special lens for examining dying in a community-based setting. During their time together, Weisse and colleagues planned a new research course with input from community leaders operating two different residential care homes, one in Naples, N.Y. (Hospeace House) and the other in Wayland, N.Y. (Vincent House). The vision for the new course is to provide students data drawn from hospice patients served by these homes to better understand ways of improving care. The course will engage students in important and meaningful public scholarship while also contributing to each academic institutions’ curricular reform initiatives (i.e. attention to diversity, equity, and inclusion, social justice and public health; quantitative reasoning; and WAC-R: writing across the curriculum-research).
