Locations:

• April 4 - Niles Gallery (9AM - 1:30PM)
• April 4 - Library Multipurpose Room (3-5PM)

Religions have received much bad press in this new age of anxious states. Theorists of globalization, world economic uncertainty, and ‘national security’, for example, publicly worry about the role politicized Islamic religiosity might be playing in the press-termed ‘Arab Spring’ and its connection to violence. Other thinkers and policy mavens, particularly those associated with the burgeoning field of ‘risk analysis’, are increasingly edgy about religiously inflected Hindu and Buddhist nationalisms in South Asia, the rise of new forms of Christianity in Africa, or the possibly ‘destabilizing’ consequences of new religious enthusiasms in Russia and China. In this conference we seek to explore the many ways religions as practices are participating in the lives of people and groups living within the increasingly fragile and unsettling developments of our hyper age.

In the wake of the triple disasters of March 11, 2011 which devastated the Tohoku region of Japan with a massive earthquake, an enormous set of tsunami, and the catastrophic failure of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear reactor, both Japanese and foreign observers struggled to make sense of these events.  Bestor examines some ways in which Japanese culture frames disasters, and based on fieldwork in Tohoku in 2011 and 2012, how local meaning-making unfolds.

Dr. Bestor earned his Ph.D. from Stanford University and is Professor of Social Anthropology and Director of the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies  at Harvard University. His books include: Routledge Handbook of Japanese Culture and Society (edited with Victoria Bestor and Akiko Yamagata, 2011), Doing Fieldwork in Japan (2003), and Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World (2004).

The Anthropology Graduate Student Association (AGSA) invites you to join the Department of Anthropology for our 13th annual Distinguished Lecture Series featuring cultrual anthropologist Dr. Thedodore Bestor. This event is free, and open to all. 

Title:  On the ground state of the magnetic Laplacian in corner domains

Abstract:  I will present recent results about the first eigenvalue of the magnetic Laplacian in general 3D-corner domains with Neumann boundary condition in the semi-classical limit.  The use of singular chains show that the asymptotics of the first eigenvalue is governed by a hierarchy of model problems on the tangent cones of the domain. We provide estimations of the remainder depending on the geometry and the variations of the magnetic field. This is a joint work with V. Bonnaillie-Nol and M. Dauge.

Ricardo Macip from the Universidad Autónoma de Puebla will be giving a lecture about one of Oaxaca's most treasured creatures: the turtle.

El Profesor de la Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, Ricardo Macip, estará dando una charla sobre las tortugas y su importancia en Oaxaca, México.

Title:  Compressible Navier-Stokes equations with temperature dependent dissipation

Abstract:  From its physical origin, the viscosity and heat conductivity coe!cients in compressible fluids depend on absolute temperature through power laws. The mathematical theory on the well-posedness and regularity on this setting is widely open. I will report some recent progress on this direction, with emphasis on the lower bound of temperature, and global existence of solutions in one or multiple dimensions. The relation between thermodynamics laws and Naiver-Stokes equations will also be discussed. This talk is based on joint works with Weizhe Zhang.