Host City USA: Dharamsala

Lara Lashus

Lara Lashus graduated from Trinity University with a BA in sociology and international studies (global health), and a concentration in gender and sexuality studies. Her interdisciplinary work focused on identity construction and relationships between gender, health, illness, and postcolonial development. In her senior year, she won the C. Wright Mills Award for outstanding achievement in sociology. She also earned departmental honors for her published thesis, “Hijra Subjectivity, Gender Affirmative Care, and the Will to Verify: A Case Study in Confirmation Desire”. The thesis, using a post-structuralist lens, investigates how colonial and state capture of the hijra identity produced arenas of suspicion and verification, thereby shaping questions of safety, authority, and authenticity for the hijra amidst new medical and socio-legal developments. This work was based on the qualitative research she conducted while studying abroad in India during her junior year. Additionally, she has studied in Paraguay, where she worked to uplift the political and environmental rights of the indigenous Guaraní. She has also researched family planning access in the rural parts of eastern Uganda through a Yale fellowship program, and is a co-author of its findings published in Health & Place.

Lara is passionate about fighting for the dignified and equitable treatment of all. She has worked closely with local organizers to collaborate with student activists, leading coalitions for reproductive justice, and as a harm reduction intern serving the impoverished and unhoused communities of San Antonio. She won grants such as the John Donahue Award for Social Justice to complete this work. For the past four years, she has been working as a research assistant to sociology professors Dr. Amanda Hernandez and Dr. Amy Stone on various projects, primarily analyzing LGBTQ youth experiences.

With her Fulbright-Nehru award, Lara is studying cultural and climatic shifts related to the business, harvest, and use of native plants for medicinal purposes in the rural Himalayan regions. Her research is also seeking answers to how different practitioners perceive and navigate cultural barriers to care in these regions, given the shifting structural and environmental constraints. Further, she is studying the role of herbal medicine in the lives of local women and the growing market for medicinal agriculture within the international economy.

Tenzin Kunsang

Tenzin Kunsang is a graduate of Cornell University with a BA in biology and society, and a minor in inequality studies on the Health Equity Track. During her time on campus, she was involved in public health and education initiatives with a specific focus on equity, social justice, and cross-cultural dialogue. This included clubs and organizations such as Cornell Center for Health Equity Undergraduate Chapter, College & Career Readiness Initiative, Community Learning and Service Partnership, and the Arts & Sciences Ambassadors Program. She also has experience in communications, having worked as the science editor for her school’s newspaper and as a communications intern at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. As a Gilman Scholar and Laidlaw Scholar, she traveled to Fiji, Nepal, and India during her undergraduate years.

A six-decade-old institution founded in Dharamshala, India, the Tibetan Children’s Village (TCV) has evolved in tandem with the sociopolitical “Tibet issue” within the India-China-U.S. triangle. As a result, there has been a rise in Himalayan descendants and overseas Tibetan refugees in TCV, but a decrease in Tibetan refugees directly from Tibet. Tenzin’s Fulbright-Nehru project in Dharamshala is particularizing the term “Himalayans” to analyze which regions are experiencing the most outmigration into TCV and why TCV is a more favorable schooling option compared to more proximate schools. Through semi-structured interviews, archival and ethnographic fieldwork, and participant observation, she is also examining how TCV students have become key components in promoting identity formation and kinship networks. On completion of the project, Tenzin plans on transferring the skills she acquired from it to pursuing an MPH at Emory’s Rollins School of Public Health.

Michael (Donagh) Coleman

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.