Tea and Talk with Maximilian Conley

The Carolina Asia Center and Phillips Ambassadors Presents an event in their Tea and Talk series. Phillips Ambassador alumnus Maximilian Conley ’19 will present a talk on the work he conducted while studying abroad in Japan, entitled “History in the Wind: Studying Weather Sociology During the 2018 West Japan Floods.”

Impersonal research and personal experience; past and present; nature and society. These categories become difficult to distinguish at times, but especially during catastrophic disasters such as the one that hit Western Japan in July of this year, killing more than 200 people. This talk is intended to plunge into these ambiguities using a range of disciplines and ideas. While one goal of this presentation is to explore ideas and controversies within the exciting field of weather sociology, it is also meant to delve very personally into what it means to study weather disaster response a few hours from Japan’s worst flood since 1982. Moreover, it will unravel the notion of “natural disaster” and point to the entanglements that define human interaction with the natural world, and the devastating effects they can have. Max invites you to his presentation and hopes to see a range of interests in his audience to spur on the development of his research in interesting and diverse directions. Max is very interested in integrating a range of frameworks into his work, from environmental sciences and sociology to philosophy and history.

Poster