2026 Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences and Education

Title
Vagueness Modeled in a Relevance Logic

Synopsis
A well-known property of natural languages is that they are imprecise; for example, they contain vague terms such as ‘bald’ and ‘a heap’. Philosophers have been debating related paradoxes (like the Sorites) for more than 2,000 years. Classical logic is based on the idea that a predicate either holds or does not hold of an object, but not both. Some many-valued logics have been used to deal with vagueness. I will show that a relevance logic, R-Mingle is more suitable to model vagueness.

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Title
Sound in Color: Pairing Music with Visual Art through Three Korean Sketches on Saeya Saeya Parang Saeya (2025)

Synopsis
This presentation introduces pairing music, a term coined by the presenter to link visual and musical art via QR codes, creating an interactive dialogue between artwork, music, and audience. Centered on Three Korean Sketches on Saeya Saeya Parang Saeya (2025), a piano suite responding to Moon Jung-Joo’s exhibition bLuE bLuE bLuE, the session includes a 7-minute video performance and explores conceptual, compositional, and interdisciplinary strategies while highlighting educational potential.

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Title
Engaging the Audience through GPS: Using AI to Design Experiential Learning Activities in the Social Sciences

Synopsis
Shows how instructors can use AI tools to design experiential learning activities that promote deeper engagement and critical thinking. Introduces the GPS framework—Games, Puzzles, and Storytelling—as an alternative to traditional assessments. A game on social mobility shows how AI-assisted design can produce meaningful classroom simulations that reveal structural inequality and foster reflection. Rather than being a threat, AI can be re-purposed as a creative partner in re-imagining pedagogy.

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Title
AI-Embedded Human Research Ethics in African Cultural Systems

Synopsis
AI is reshaping scientific research, highlighting the need to revise international ethical guidelines for global collaboration. African research ethics challenges Western-centric values in global bioethics, calling for more inclusive and diverse perspectives. Grounded in communal values, African frameworks can guide AI research integrity by addressing key concerns such as informed consent, privacy, data quality, and cultural sensitivity.

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²Department of Mathematics, Computer Science,
And Engineering Technology
Elizabeth City State University
Elizabeth City, North Carolina

³Department of Mathematics, Computer Science,,
And Engineering
Perimeter College
Georgia State University
Atlanta, Georgia

Title
An Outline of An Interdisciplinary Framework for Teaching Modeling and Simulation with Mathematics, Python, and AI

Synopsis
This paper presents a framework combining mathematics, Python, and AI to teach modeling and simulation. Emphasizing hands-on learning, it enables students to design computational models for real-world challenges. The approach fosters creativity, analytical thinking, and problem-solving, preparing learners with transferable skills for research, engineering, business, and technology-driven fields.

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²Department of Mathematics, Computer Science & Engineering Technology
Elizabeth City State University
Elizabeth City, North Carolina

Title
Ten Classroom-Tested Strategies for Fostering Meaningful Student Collaboration

Synopsis
This paper presents a practice-informed framework that moves beyond unstructured group work toward the intentional cultivation of a culture of collaboration. Drawing on interdisciplinary teaching experience across STEM and business, the authors propose ten concrete, actionable strategies, such as structured role rotation, co-created collaboration norms, and metacognitive reflection, designed to enhance student engagement, equity, and meaningful participation.

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²Department of Mathematics, Computer Science, & Engineering Technology
Elizabeth City State University
Elizabeth City, North Carolina

Title
Integrating Core Analytical Skills with Generative AI in Investment Strategies

Synopsis
This paper explores integrating mathematics, logic, algorithms, and programming with generative AI to enhance investment decision-making. Using applications such as retirement planning, investment growth, and mortgages, it demonstrates how AI complements analytical skills, fostering creativity and rigor. The framework equips individuals to navigate today’s complex, technology-driven financial landscape effectively.

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University/Organization
Languages, Linguistics, and Comparative Literature
Florida Atlantic University
Boca Raton, Florida

Title
Staging Strategies: Dolores Prida’s and Carmen Duarte’s Cuban Doppelgängerinnen

Synopsis
This work focuses on Coser y cantar (1981) by Dolores Prida (1943-2013) and Carolina de Alto Songo (1987) by Carmen Duarte (1959 – ) and the staging strategy of the gestic monologue employed by these Cuban playwrights to present two views through one actress embodying two characters. The plays denounce the discrimination faced by the protagonists in two different settings (NYC in the late 70s and Havana in the late 80s).

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University/Organization
Modern & Classical Languages
Buffalo State College
Buffalo, New York

Title
Silhouettes Crying Beneath Freedom’s Bells: Dylan’s Vision of Social Justice in Three Songs

Synopsis
This paper explores Bob Dylan’s enduring call for social justice through three emblematic songs: “Blowin’ in the Wind” (1963), “Chimes of Freedom” (1964), and “Hurricane.” Together, these three songs trace Dylan’s evolution from a philosophical observer to a direct participant in the struggle for justice. They showcase his ability to fuse art and activism, using poetic language, historical context, and musical innovation to inspire awareness, empathy, and change.

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Title
Transcending Conventional Reality: Ancient and Modern Testimonies

Synopsis
In my 2025 presentation, I discussed a number of ancient and modern sources arguing for the experience of specific physical manifestations encountered on the path of a successful spiritual evolution. These manifestations have been described in a plethora and variety of sources from ancient to modern times, i.e., the Vedas, the Bible, Plato, the Neoplatonists, modern psychology (the most eminent proponent being Carl Jung), studies in near-death experiences, etc. The validity of such experiences, non-conforming to the accepted parameters of what is considered “normal,” can be even corroborated by recent developments in quantum physics, where the accepted laws of what has been considered a material universe are being challenged. In this presentation, I will discuss information we possess from the past and the more recent present regarding these physical manifestations, descriptions from individuals who experienced them, as well as adverse reactions such admissions produced. Social shunning, persecution, or institutionalization, often resulting from sharing such experiences, can be a strong deterrent in disseminating such information and enriching an important field of knowledge, which deserves attention in the present strong technological orientation of our civilization.

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Title
Black Studies, AI, and Healthcare Disparities

Synopsis
This presentation investigates the notion that artificial intelligence (AI) holds great potential to revolutionize the delivery of healthcare in the United States. The central question of this project is whether AI has the potential to reduce or eliminate health disparities among historically marginalized populations of color in the United States.

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Title
From Covenants to Classrooms: Uncovering the Impact of Racial Segregation on Education in Minnesota

Synopsis
This study examines how racial covenants in Minnesota created segregated neighborhoods, leading to unequal, segregated schools. Integration efforts in the 1960s–70s, such as busing and school closures, often harmed Black communities instead of helping. Combined with urban renewal projects that displaced Black families, these policies deepened educational disparities. The paper reveals how structural racism shaped lasting inequities in Minnesota’s schools.

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Title
Teaching Program Music through Storytelling in Piano Performance Tutorial Lessons

Synopsis
Applying research on conversational storytelling and instructional discourse, this study investigates how music storytelling is used to teach piano performance in online video tutorial lessons. It explicates how piano instructors explain musical structure, transform written musical symbols into spoken language, and storify program music—instrumental music that conveys extra-musical meanings by evoking a series of images, depicting events, or telling a story.

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Title
Laughter, Humor, and the Failure of Language in Elif Batuman’s The Idiot

Synopsis
This paper examines laughter as a marker of power in Elif Batuman’s The Idiot (2017). Through close reading and humor theory, it argues that—contrary to protagonist Selin’s belief—language is not the novel’s primary betrayer. Instead, larger social forces, mediated through both laughter and language, generate disconnection and harm. As a nuanced rhetorical response, laughter exposes social imbalances that destabilize trust in communication and reinforce Selin’s powerlessness.

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Title
Hybrid Moral Agency: The “We-It” Phenomenon

Synopsis
The greatest obstacle to human freedom is now the assumption that humans are autonomous with respect to technological systems. In a world where all collective societal activities are mediated and channeled by technological systems which have their own value frameworks and requirements, the Enlightenment meaning of human autonomy is now a distortion undermining all of ethics and attempts to morally limit system growth and development. Understanding the relation between the “I” and the “we” requires reflection on the agency of the “it”, the technological system that mediate all actions.

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Title
Postcolonial Studies and Victimization: The Space and Claim of the Victim

Synopsis
Postcolonial Studies has historically exposed the plight and condition of victims of colonial history. Much of postcolonial theory is predicated on the dynamics of the colonial victim’s condition. Rarely, though, does postcolonial theory examine the very dynamics of naming a victim or the dynamics of victimization itself. This paper examines how postcolonial studies often ignores the problematic dynamics of victimization and a reciprocity that seeks to appropriate the victim’s position.

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Title
Weaving Futures, Cultivating Change: Women’s Cooperatives and Ecological Empowerment in Rural Morocco

Synopsis
This study examines Moroccan women’s cooperatives as grassroots institutions that blend economic work with cultural and ecological resilience. Through case studies and fieldwork, it highlights how rural women use cooperative models to navigate gender norms, assert leadership, increase literacy rates, and sustain traditional knowledge within Amazigh and Islamic frameworks.

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Title
Conspiracy Theory of Insurance

Synopsis
Insurance is commonly defined as a means of protection from financial loss in which, in exchange for a fee, a party (the insurer) agrees to compensate another party (the insured) in the event of a certain loss, damage, or injury. The word “protection” is naturally associated with the word “insurance”. In this work, we challenge that premise.
Instead, we propose that the social purpose of private insurance is to encourage greater risk-taking by absorbing some consequences of risk-taking by insurers, in return for compensation received in the form of insurance premiums. We illustrate this with the historical pattern of the creation of modern private insurance in the late 1600s in London (while prior insurance arrangements existed in the world, those developments in London were a crucial turn in history, in our view). We then compare and contrast those developments with social insurance creation in the late 1800s in Germany. We note how those developments in the late 1600s and the late 1800s were not merely some marginal developments in insurance, but rather, they marked two crucial turns in the economic and political history of the world. We observe how certain aspects of those two developments seem largely ignored in the common perception of insurance, thus creating an apparent “conspiracy.”

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Title
Criminalizing Dissent: The Hong Kong Model of Repression

Synopsis
This essay examines how the People’s Republic of China’s response to the 2019 Uprising in Hong Kong fundamentally altered the city’s political landscape. It centers on the enactment of the National Security Law (NSL) on June 30, 2020, which is a deliberate distortion of Hong Kong’s core value of the “rule of law.” The NSL marked the start of a new era of repression, aiming to transform Hong Kong from a hub of opposition into a model of enforced compliance through legal means.

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Title
Carrying the Burden: A Qualitative Study of SUD Counselors’ Challenges, Coping, and Calls for Systemic Change Post-Pandemic

Synopsis
The COVID-19 pandemic significantly impacted those with Substance Use Disorders (SUD), especially individuals affected by the opioid crisis. However, less is known about how SUD counselors navigated this evolving landscape. This qualitative study explores the lived experiences of 14 SUD counselors who provided care during and after the pandemic.

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