This book is the product of years of a global conversation across many disciplines and many time zones between the editors and the contributors about the meaning of modernity today and the crises we all face in the form of globalization, climate crisis, technological advancement, populism, and now a global pandemic. We wanted to understand how scholars who work in different parts of the world and are engaged in disparate areas of research such as sociology, mathematics, philosophy, medicine, political science, artificial intelligence, visual theory, literary theory, etc., would respond to a call to share their disciplinary perspectives on the understanding and challenges of modernity today, and – most importantly – the opportunities and the alternatives they would propose. The following pages contain the results of these conversations.

One of the unintended consequences of conducting a conversation across multiple disciplines, multiple languages, and multiple geographies is that one begins to realize the immensity of the methodological and linguistic disjunctions which still significantly demarcate our disciplines. As editors, we elected to respect the disciplinary and linguistic diversity of our contributors at the expense of consistency and conformity.

We wish also and most of all to offer our deepest thanks and gratitude to our contributors for their hard work and inspired contributions. In addition, we want to recognize the contributions of all those who supported our project, directly or indirectly, particularly colleagues and friends whom we met all around the world since the beginning of this book journey in the summer of 2018 in Beijing and then in Orlando, Florida. We owe to them the essential spirit, inspiration, and curiosity that were necessary to achieve this work. In alphabetic order, we thank Debbie Barr, Patrick Blythe, Elizabeth Deans, David DiQuattro, Roger Downey, Michael Flaherty, Fayeza Hasanat, Baboucar Jobe, Louise Kaine, Michael Mendoza, Marwan Shaban, Debra Socci, Lisa Valentino, Adrienne Vivian, and Han Wen.