Wesley Wildman<\/a> 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 \u201cheadway on seemingly intractable social problems.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\u201cWe\u2019d been studying religious extremism for some time,\u201d Wildman says, speaking of the Center for Mind and Culture, the nonprofit research institute he directs. \u201cWhat the Marathon bombings did was catalyze this awareness that so much of what we do as professors is not very effective\u201d in predicting when violence can erupt. \u201cIf you work in the computational humanities, it can be difficult to actually have an effect on anything.\u201d<\/p>\n
His quest to help policymakers craft \u201cbetter projections about what\u2019s likely to happen\u201d led him and an international team of researchers, funded by the John Templeton Foundation and Wildman\u2019s Center for Mind and Culture, on a three-year research project. Their goal: simulate, with computers, the conditions under which societies\u2019 religious extremists might turn violent. As part of the work, Wildman recruited filmmaker Jenn Lindsay (GRS\u201918), 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.<\/p>\n
The resulting documentary, Simulating Religious Violence<\/em>, will have its North American premiere November 19 at BU\u2019s 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\u2019s Religion Today film festival.<\/p>\nRead the Full Article<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Read about the Simulating Religious Violence project by CDS Professor Wesley J. Wildman, from the documentary’s early stages to its upcoming premiere!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18839,"featured_media":14793,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5,230,35,244],"tags":[622,315],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14792"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18839"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14792"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14792\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14794,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14792\/revisions\/14794"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14793"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14792"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14792"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14792"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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