Purity without Borders: Material Culture and Jewish Diaspora in the Late Second Temple Period

Chalkstone vessels, interpreted as objects for certain Jewish purity concerns, found on Tall Zira’a, near Gadara (Northern Jordan), bring up the question how purity obligations were practiced in the early Jewish Diaspora during the Roman Period. In Israel they are mostly known in the region of Galilee and Iudaea, in Jewish religiously observant environments.Growing numbers of those finds in Jordan – also in small scale settlements - in general show a larger distribution of these objects than originally thought. I would like to discuss if we see here a religious concern, a certain ‘aesthetical’ trend or a matter of identity.How have they been relevant to the community that lived outside the borders of ‘Biblical Israel’ and had no frequent access to the Temple or Jerusalem as a holy centre? Could the indication of the objects change in a more Gentile environment like Jordan?These material finds could be an opportunity to approach a wider understanding of the daily life of the early Diaspora

The Coloniality of Global Knowledge Production: Theorizing the Mechanisms of Academic Dependency

Increasing calls to decolonize global knowledge production highlight the necessity of understanding the causes of inequality in global knowledge production, or ‘academic dependency.’ While theories of academic dependency or dimensions thereof already exist, there is a shortage of comprehensive accounts of the mechanisms creating and re-inscribing academic dependency. Integrating and extending previous theorizations, this article presents such a theory: I show how global academic stratification grants the academic core a standard-setting position, giving it power over the globally most highly valued mechanisms of evaluating research. This pressures academics anywhere on the globe to orient their research toward the preferences of the academic core (i.e., Global North ones). Further, the global stratification of the research degree system, with both core and periphery academic elites being trained in the core, strengthens Northern intellectual lineages and enhances North-to-South flows of academic influence, while disrupting Southern intellectual traditions and stifling South-to-North flows of academic influence. The stronger power of core academics in core-periphery collaborations centers Northern concerns and marginalizes Southern ones. English as the global academic language further privileges academics from Anglophone countries. This creates an inward-orientation of Northern knowledge production, producing over-theorized and Eurocentric knowledge lacking corrective feedback from the South, while creating an outward-orientation of Southern knowledge production, yielding fragmented, undertheorized knowledge disconnected from local concerns

International Conference Negotiating Ethnicity: Politics and Display of Cultural Identities in Northeast India. Vienna, 4-6 July 2013

Report of the International Conference: Negotiating Ethnicity: Politics and Display of Cultural Identities in Northeast India. Vienna, 4-6 July 201

Diffusion of a passive scalar by convective flows under parametric disorder

We study transport of a weakly diffusive pollutant (a passive scalar) by thermoconvective flow in a fluid-saturated horizontal porous layer heated from below under frozen parametric disorder. In the presence of disorder (random frozen inhomogeneities of the heating or of macroscopic properties of the porous matrix), spatially localized flow patterns appear below the convective instability threshold of the system without disorder. Thermoconvective flows crucially effect the transport of a pollutant along the layer, especially when its molecular diffusion is weak. The effective (or eddy) diffusivity also allows to observe the transition from a set of localized currents to an almost everywhere intense "global" flow. We present results of numerical calculation of the effective diffusivity and discuss them in the context of localization of fluid currents and the transition to a "global" flow. Our numerical findings are in a good agreement with the analytical theory we develop for the limit of a small molecular diffusivity and sparse domains of localized currents. Though the results are obtained for a specific physical system, they are relevant for a broad variety of fluid dynamical systems.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures, the revised version of the paper for J. Stat. Mech. (Special issue for proceedings of 5th Intl. Conf. on Unsolved Problems on Noise and Fluctuations in Physics, Biology & High Technology, Lyon (France), June 2-6, 2008

Advectional enhancement of eddy diffusivity under parametric disorder

Frozen parametric disorder can lead to appearance of sets of localized convective currents in an otherwise stable (quiescent) fluid layer heated from below. These currents significantly influence the transport of an admixture (or any other passive scalar) along the layer. When the molecular diffusivity of the admixture is small in comparison to the thermal one, which is quite typical in nature, disorder can enhance the effective (eddy) diffusivity by several orders of magnitude in comparison to the molecular diffusivity. In this paper we study the effect of an imposed longitudinal advection on delocalization of convective currents, both numerically and analytically; and report subsequent drastic boost of the effective diffusivity for weak advection.Comment: 14 pages, 6 figures, for Topical Issue of Physica Scripta "2nd Intl. Conf. on Turbulent Mixing and Beyond