BU Today: A BU Filmmaker Captures a BU Researcher’s Quest against Religious Violence
Excerpt from BU Today | By: Rich Barlow | November 15, 2024 | Photo: Jenn Lindsay
Wesley Wildman wears two academic hats: in humanities (a professor of philosophy, theology, and ethics at the School of Theology) and in computer science (a joint appointment with the Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences). His work, his STH profile notes, seeks to make “headway on seemingly intractable social problems.” Yet he was as stunned as the rest of the country at the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, committed as retaliation for US wars in Muslim countries.
“We’d been studying religious extremism for some time,” Wildman says, speaking of the Center for Mind and Culture, the nonprofit research institute he directs. “What the Marathon bombings did was catalyze this awareness that so much of what we do as professors is not very effective” in predicting when violence can erupt. “If you work in the computational humanities, it can be difficult to actually have an effect on anything.”
His quest to help policymakers craft “better projections about what’s likely to happen” led him and an international team of researchers, funded by the John Templeton Foundation and Wildman’s Center for Mind and Culture, on a three-year research project. Their goal: simulate, with computers, the conditions under which societies’ religious extremists might turn violent. As part of the work, Wildman recruited filmmaker Jenn Lindsay (GRS’18), an acquaintance from her time at BU studying for a doctorate of philosophy in the social science of religion. Lindsay shadowed the researchers from BU to Virginia, Norway, and refugee camps in Lesvos, Greece.
The resulting documentary, Simulating Religious Violence, will have its North American premiere November 19 at BU’s Center for Computing & Data Sciences, Room 1750. (The event is sold out, but the screening and a follow-up panel discussion will be livestreamed, starting at 5 p.m.) The following day, it will debut overseas at Italy’s Religion Today film festival.