University of California-Berkeley Archives

Michael (Donagh) Coleman holds degrees in philosophy and psychology (BA) and in music and media technologies (MPhil) from Trinity College Dublin, and an MA in Asian studies from UC Berkeley. He is currently a PhD candidate in medical anthropology at UC Berkeley where his dissertation research focuses on Tibetan Buddhist tukdam deaths and their Tibetan and scientific figurations. Donagh was a 2022 Dissertation Fellow at the ACLS/Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Program in Buddhist Studies. He has also worked as a documentary filmmaker and made award-winning films with wide international festival and TV exposure like Tukdam: Between Worlds (2022), A Gesar Bard’s Tale (2013), and Stone Pastures (2008). Donagh’s films have also been shown at museums such as MoMA and the Rubin Museum of Art in New York, and by the European Commission.

In the state of tukdam, the bodies of meditators do not show usual signs of death for days or even weeks after clinical death. According to Tibetan Buddhists, the practitioners are resting in a subtle state of consciousness and are still in the process of dying. Donagh’s Fulbright-Hays project is juxtaposing Tibetan and biomedical understandings of death and tukdam, with a particular focus on a scientific study of tukdam in Tibetan settlements in India. He is looking at issues of incommensurability between Indo-Tibetan and scientific views, related questions of consciousness, and the cultural power that science may exert over Tibetan Buddhist knowledge and its formulations in this context.

Alyssa Heinze is a PhD Candidate in political science at the University of California, Berkeley. She researches gendered understandings of: the political economy of local development; political inequality; and the consequences of climate change. She is a two-time Fulbright fellowship recipient. Alyssa holds an MSc in economics from Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and a BA in political science and South Asian studies from Dartmouth College. She has worked for the Impact Data and Evidence Aggregation Library project at the World Bank; she was part of the Research, Evaluation and Data Team at IDinsight and of the Women’s Economic Empowerment Unit at the U.S. Department of State. She has also done stints with Vera Solutions in Mumbai, India, and with Chhori in Kathmandu, Nepal.

In her Fulbright-Hays project, Alyssa is examining how state policies – community water governance and drought relief programs – can mitigate the gender inequalities caused by drought. She hypothesizes that women’s inclusion in these policies is pivotal for the prevention of drought-induced gender inequality. Alyssa’s study is located in Maharashtra, India, a region susceptible to the adverse effects of drought. Employing a mixed-methods approach, she is gathering qualitative and quantitative data to assess the causal relationship between state intervention, drought, and gender inequality. This study is expected to inform policy formulation on increasing the resilience of climate-vulnerable communities across India.