Cultural

Are you looking for a safe and supportive space to practice your English conversation skills? Check out Dashew Center's English Language Circle (ELC)! Here you will have an opportunity to practice your English with other language learners. The circle is led by a native English speaker, who will help you become more confident in your speaking skills and who can answer your language and grammar questions. All of our ELC sessions will take place on Zoom this spring 2026. Space is limited to 20 participants per session. Participants are welcome to enjoy their lunch during these sessions. The Zoom link will be shared via email upon registering. Please email us at intlprograms@saonet.ucla.edu with any questions.

#Cultural #Multicultural

Since the 1960s religious practitioners have created their own music to express their beliefs and values to shield the community from popular culture. The Irony is they use the popular culture that they reject from American culture in their music. This presentation by Mark Kligman (UCLA) will highlight important composers and groups with audio and video examples of Orthodox Jewish and Christian Contemporary Music.

#Undergraduate #FacultyStaff #Alumni #Cultural #Religious

Are you looking for a safe and supportive space to practice your English conversation skills? Check out Dashew Center's English Language Circle (ELC)! Here you will have an opportunity to practice your English with other language learners. The circle is led by a native English speaker, who will help you become more confident in your speaking skills and who can answer your language and grammar questions. All of our ELC sessions will take place on Zoom this spring 2026. Space is limited to 20 participants per session. Participants are welcome to enjoy their lunch during these sessions. The Zoom link will be shared via email upon registering. Please email us at intlprograms@saonet.ucla.edu with any questions.

#Cultural #Multicultural

Are you looking for a safe and supportive space to practice your English conversation skills? Check out Dashew Center's English Language Circle (ELC)! Here you will have an opportunity to practice your English with other language learners. The circle is led by a native English speaker, who will help you become more confident in your speaking skills and who can answer your language and grammar questions. All of our ELC sessions will take place on Zoom this spring 2026. Space is limited to 20 participants per session. Participants are welcome to enjoy their lunch during these sessions. The Zoom link will be shared via email upon registering. Please email us at intlprograms@saonet.ucla.edu with any questions.

#Cultural #Multicultural

In this talk, Miki Chase (U of Wisconsin-Madison) explores how trajectories of illness and care, such as terminal cancer or anticipated cognitive decline, are reinterpreted through Jain doctrinal frameworks in the narratives of adult children of women who undertake the Jain ritual fast to death (sallekhana or santhara). Drawing on ethnographic accounts of women’s deaths in contemporary urban Jain households, Chase traces how narratives of bodily decline are reframed not as losses to be managed through medical intervention but as conditions of spiritual possibility that invite ascetic detachment and renunciation. Rather than resisting biomedical or bioethical paradigms outright, these narratives inhabit a complex zone of overlap where cognitive clarity is both a medical and religious ideal; the attenuation of pain is karmically elevated rather than clinically managed; and the logic of institutionalized care is subtly displaced not by the absence of obligation but by alternate forms of care. In tracing the limits of bioethical paradigms that presume the necessity of medicalization and institutional oversight, this talk describes how “illness narratives” and “santhara narratives” coalesce to challenge prevailing understandings of what it means to die well, and how suffering, pain, and the medicalized body is accounted for in the lives—and deaths—of Jain women.

#Cultural