Category: Academic Reportage

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Darcie Price-Wallace, Visiting Scholar in Religious Studies, Northwestern University

In August 2025, 161 Tibetan Buddhist nuns from religious institutions across India and Nepal – a record number – gathered at the Dolma Ling Nunnery in northern India to take various levels of the “geshema” examination. These exams are in preparation for one day receiving the geshema degree, comparable with a doctorate in Tibetan Buddhist philosophy. The nearly four-week gathering was especially notable because until 13 years ago it was completely unavailable to women.

Now, thanks to a greater emphasis on women’s education in recent years, Tibetan Buddhist nuns are increasingly becoming teachers and abbesses. In monastic institutions and in Buddhist centers around the world, nuns are taking on leadership roles and being acknowledged for their religious scholarship, including the geshema degree.

As a scholar of religious studies and gender, I study the changing roles of women in Buddhism. While nuns were long respected in Tibetan Buddhist culture, they were historically not granted access to the same educational or leadership opportunities as monks. But that has changed, in part due to the crucial role played by the 14th Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso.

He encouraged nuns to become advanced degree holders as part of his broader goal to increase gender parity. “Biologically there is no difference between the brains of men and women and the Buddha clearly gave equal rights to men and women,” he said in 2013. In addition to nuns reciting prayers and performing rituals, he emphasized they should study classic Buddhist texts, something traditionally reserved for men.

Such guidance has helped challenge historical misconceptions about women’s intellectual abilities that undermined women’s prominence in Buddhism. Indeed, nuns are now teaching philosophy within their own nunneries at home and abroad, becoming principals of their institutions, serving as role models for other nuns and the laity, and entering long retreats – a staple of Buddhist contemplative activities on the path to awakening.

Historical roots

The Dalai Lama has resided in exile since 1959, when he fled to northern India following unrest over the Chinese occupation of Tibet. Many Tibetans followed him, and he has remained the key religious and political leader of the Tibetan community and diaspora ever since, though he officially gave up political duties in 2011 to the Tibetan government in exile.

During the Dalai Lama’s decades of leadership, improving education for the diaspora communities of Tibetans in India and Nepal has been a crucial avenue for protecting and preserving Tibetan culture, including Tibetan Buddhism.

Historically, however, the path of formal education was primarily reserved for monks. In Tibet, nuns were primarily ritual specialists, according to Buddhist studies scholars such as Karma Lekshe Tsomo, Mitra Härköken and Nicola Schneider. They performed rituals in temples and homes but rarely had the opportunity to study the Buddhist texts.

And even with the Dalai Lama’s support, developing a systematic course of study for nuns that was equivalent to monks’ curriculum was not easy, especially with only a limited number of nunneries in India and Nepal, according to Schneider’s research.

“When the nuns arrived in India, they were ill, exhausted, traumatized and impoverished,” recalled Lobsang Dechen, co-director of the nonprofit Tibetan Nuns Project, in 2023. “Many nuns had faced torture and imprisonment at the hands of the Chinese authorities in Tibet and endured immense physical and emotional pain. The existing nunneries in the struggling Tibetan refugee community in India were already overcrowded and could not accommodate them.”

Nuns’ education prospects were also hampered by limited literacy and monks who held administrative and decision-making roles over them. The women essentially lived in “masculine institutions inhabited by nuns,” scholar Chandra Chiara Ehm argued in her ethnographic work on the Kopan Nunnery in Nepal. Ehm found monk administrators tended to endorse the Dalai Lama’s calls for gender parity in name without directly supporting nuns’ education.

A new age for educational opportunities

Increased access to education for nuns began to change in the 1980s as more Tibetan nuns migrated to India and Nepal. A network of more developed nunneries followed, such as Gaden Choling and Dolma Ling in Dharamshala, India, where the Dalai Lama lives in exile.

These institutions were funded by organizations such as the Tibetan Nuns Project, part of the broader Tibetan Women’s Association that was established in Tibet in 1959 in response to the Chinese occupation. The TWA was reinstated in India with the blessing of the Dalai Lama in 1984, and the Tibetan Nuns Project was established soon thereafter to educate and support nuns in India from all Tibetan schools.

The Dalai Lama encouraged these organizations to help build nunneries, empower existing nuns and support their further education. “In the beginning when I spoke about awarding Geshema degrees, some were doubtful,” the Dalai Lama recalled in 2018. “I clearly told them that Buddha had given equal opportunity for both men and women.”

Alongside the Dalai Lama’s efforts and more Tibetan nuns coming into the diaspora in India and Nepal, several other factors helped promote women’s advancement.

Those include the advocacy and support of international organizations such as Sakyadhita International Association of Buddhist Women, which has hosted international meetings to empower nuns and lay Buddhist women for nearly 40 years.

Within India, meanwhile, local nonprofits such as the Ladakh Nuns Association have provided opportunities for nuns to work in health care.

Reaching the highest ladder of monastic teaching

The geshema degree that nuns have been able to receive since 2012 is in the Geluk tradition, one of the four schools, or distinct branches, of Tibetan Buddhism. These degrees are the highest level of monastic training but were previously available only to men, whose degree are known as “khenpo” or “geshe.”

Candidates for the geshema degree are tested after having studied Buddhist texts. Nuns must score 75% or higher during their 17 years of study before qualifying to take the geshema examinations.

In 2016, the Dalai Lama presided over and granted 20 Tibetan nuns geshema degrees, four years after he and the Tibetan government in exile recognized the accreditation of higher degrees for nuns. Before the formal development of the geshema program, only one German nun, Kelsang Wango, had received a degree. Now, there are 73 geshemas.

After the Geluk school began granting geshema degrees, nuns within the other schools of Tibetan Buddhism – Nyingma, Sakya and Kagyu – also began pursuing advanced degrees in India and Nepal. Within these other three branches, nuns carry the title of “khenmo,” which like the geshema qualifies them to teach the renowned Buddhist scriptures. In 2022, the Dalai Lama offered blessings to the new khenmo, who received their titles in the Sakya school.

All told, nuns are changing the course for Tibetan Buddhist women – and have had an ally in the Dalai Lama.

As the numbers of women at the highest echelons of learning continue to grow, women will likewise expand their ability to take leadership roles in their monastic and lay communities – helping to improve other nuns’ education and protecting Tibetan culture in the process.

Darcie Price-Wallace received funding from a Fulbright Grant for her dissertation research.

– ref. Tibetan Buddhist nuns are getting advanced degrees − and the Dalai Lama played a major role in that shift – https://theconversation.com/tibetan-buddhist-nuns-are-getting-advanced-degrees-and-the-dalai-lama-played-a-major-role-in-that-shift-261824

Source: The Conversation – USA – By David Ramotowski, Ph.D. Candidate in Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Iowa

Polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, a class of fire-resistant industrial chemicals, were widely used in electrical transformers, oils, paints and even building materials throughout the 20th century. However, once scientists learned PCBs were accumulating in the environment and posed a cancer risk to humans, new PCB production was banned in the late 1970s, although so-called legacy PCBs remain in use.

Unfortunately, banned isn’t the same as gone, which is where scientists like me come in. PCBs remain in the environment to this day, as they are considered a class of “forever chemicals” that attach to soil and sediment particles that settle at the bottom of bodies of water. They do not easily break down once in the environment because they are inert and do not typically bind or react with other molecules and chemicals.

Some sediments can release PCBs into water and air. As a result, they have spread all over the world, even to the Arctic and the bottom of the ocean, thousands of miles from any known source.

Airborne PCBs particularly affect people living near contaminated sites. Current cleanup methods involve either transferring contaminated sediment to a chemical waste landfill or incinerating it, which is expensive and could unintentionally release more PCBs into the air.

I’m a Ph.D. candidate in civil and environmental engineering at the University of Iowa. My research seeks to prevent PCBs from getting into the air by using bacteria to break down the PCBs directly at contaminated sites – without needing to remove and dispose of the sediment.

Introducing bacteria to the environment

I work with a bacteria species called Paraburkholderia xenovorans LB400, or LB400 for short. First discovered in 1985 in a New York chemical waste landfill, LB400 has since become one of the most well-known aerobic, or oxygen-using, PCB-degrading bacteria, able to work in both freshwater and saltwater sediments. LB400 can effectively break down the lighter PCBs that are more likely to end up in the air and pose a threat to nearby communities.

LB400 degrades PCBs by adding oxygen atoms to one side of a PCB molecule. This ultimately results in the PCB splitting in half and producing compounds called chlorobenzoates, along with other organic acids. Other bacteria can degrade these compounds or turn them into carbon dioxide. My colleagues and I plan to measure them in our future work to ensure that these byproducts do not pose a threat to LB400 and other life forms.

However, LB400 cannot survive for very long in most PCB-polluted environments, so it can’t yet clean up these chemicals at a larger scale. For example, in some places with historically high levels of contamination, such as the harbor of New Bedford, Massachusetts, strong currents can wash the bacteria out to sea as soon as they’re introduced. Additionally, changing oxygen levels at high and low tide and salinity in the harbor may harm them.

Where biochar comes in

Because it is difficult to introduce bacteria on its own into the environment, I am working on a delivery mechanism that involves attaching the bacteria to the surface of biochar.

Biochar is a charcoallike material made from heating plant materials at very high temperatures in low-oxygen conditions in a process called pyrolysis.

Combined with bacteria, biochar could become an effective one-two punch to keep PCBs out of our air. The biochar provides a safe habitat for the bacteria, and it can attract PCBs from sediment through adsorption, bringing the PCBs into contact with the bacteria on the surface, which will break down the PCBs.

My colleagues and I still need to figure out the specifics of adding the bacteria-coated biochar into the environment. Right now, the idea is that the biochar will sink to the bottom where sediments are. But if the biochar doesn’t travel on its own to where we need it to be, we may need to look into other delivery methods, such as injecting it directly into the sediment.

In addition, my research group has tested different types of biochar materials and found that biochar made from corn kernels worked best with the bacteria. For the 2025-2026 market year, the United States is projected to produce over 400 million tons of corn, making it a stable, abundant, homegrown resource for this research.

Before any federal, state or city-level agencies can use this PCB cleanup method on a large scale, I need to solve two important problems. First, I must determine the correct amount of biochar to use. Too little would have no significant effect because there would not be enough biochar to attract PCBs and not enough bacteria to break them down. But too much would be too expensive and impractical.

Additionally, my colleagues and I are working to further protect the bacteria attached to biochar by surrounding it with a protective “sol-gel” material, which we are working to patent. Due to its high porosity and ideal pore size, this gel allows pollutants such as PCBs in while keeping out toxins that could pose a threat to LB400. The sol-gel also helps prevent strong currents from detaching the bacteria.

This sol-gel could further extend the bacteria’s useful life, which will make the treatment more cost-effective and practical for communities affected by airborne PCBs.

While our methods have not yet been used at a large scale, my research group and I are currently working on testing this hypothesis in the lab. If successful, we could then begin to conduct field trials and work toward scaling up this method for use at PCB-contaminated sites nationwide.

My research team hopes the combined forces of bacteria and corn-kernel biochar can potentially one day give communities the freedom to flourish in a world free from PCBs.

David Ramotowski receives funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIEHS P42ES013661) and previously from the University of Iowa Post-Comprehensive Fellowship.

– ref. Bacteria attached to charcoal could help keep an infamous ‘forever chemical’ out of waterways – https://theconversation.com/bacteria-attached-to-charcoal-could-help-keep-an-infamous-forever-chemical-out-of-waterways-262762

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Jacob L. Nelson, Associate Professor of Communication, University of Utah

For weeks, there has been a great deal of reporting about an impending shake-up in the world of television news. Paramount Global CEO David Ellison is in talks to purchase The Free Press, an online media startup launched in 2021 as a conservative alternative to traditional news organizations.

Once the deal goes through, Ellison is weighing giving Free Press editor and CEO Bari Weiss the job of editor in chief at CBS News.

Should she get the job, Weiss will immediately become a “key figure in shaping the national news environment,” in the words of an article in The Guardian.

The writing Weiss has edited and produced over the years, which conveys a deep disdain for legacy news media, offers hints at what that “shaping” might look like. Among the examples: The Free Press has published essays accusing NPR of a “liberal bias” and arguing against diversity, equity and inclusion.

Weiss, who worked at The New York Times before starting The Free Press, quit her job in 2020 as an opinion editor and writer with a resignation letter that referred to the Times as a place where “intellectual curiosity – let alone risk-taking – is now a liability.”

Though it is too soon to say what, specifically, Weiss plans to do should she take over CBS News, her record at The Free Press suggests the network’s journalism would look radically different than it does now.

But even if Weiss dramatically changes people’s experience watching CBS News, it is unlikely those changes will affect how the public feels about CBS News.

This might seem counterintuitive. After all, isn’t someone’s reaction to media dictated by their experience consuming it? A movie is good if we find it entertaining and worthwhile, and it’s bad if the opposite is true.

Waning trust in journalism

Why isn’t the same true when it comes to journalism? We tend to take for granted that people will consume news despite the fact that most Americans find the news untrustworthy and the experience of following the news mentally exhausting. So, perhaps a better question is how people’s increasing distrust of journalism affects their interactions with and perceptions of individual news outlets.

As a scholar who researches the relationship between journalism and the public, I have spent the past five years trying to answer these questions. Since the spring of 2020, University of Oregon professor Seth Lewis and I have interviewed hundreds of Americans about their trust in journalists and journalism.

Our research, which has been published in academic journals and will be published soon in a book by MIT Press, suggests that people’s relationship with news is defined less by their impressions of individual news stories, journalists or organizations. Instead, the public’s views are shaped more by a broad skepticism toward the profession as a whole.

That skepticism has less to do with what the news actually looks like than it does with people’s assumption that journalism is compromised by the pursuit of profit. As one of our interviewees told us: “It’s profits over journalism and over truth.”

This sentiment suggests that for the public it may not matter much whether Weiss takes over CBS, given it will still perceive Weiss’ boss as being more motivated by money than mission.

A bipartisan distrust of news

This profit-oriented skepticism toward the news goes against the conventional wisdom that people trust news outlets that they feel align with their political ideologies and distrust those that do not.

If that conventional wisdom were true, a Weiss-led CBS might alienate a progressive subset of the public while bringing in a conservative one. Weiss’ audience from The Free Press would follow her to one of the largest, most established brands in journalism, while those who share Weiss’ ideological leanings but are not aware of The Free Press would be pleasantly surprised to find their views suddenly represented on CBS News.

This sequence of events makes intuitive sense. Yet it is inconsistent with what we’ve learned about how people think about and interact with news.

Instead, people are likely to see CBS’ new direction less as a sign of a sincere, bottom-up ideological shift by those working at the network and more as a top-down effort by corporate elites seeking to maximize profits.

The people we interview often describe journalists generally, and television news reporters specifically, as being pushed by their organizations’ owners to politicize and sensationalize their reporting in hopes of appealing to – and monetizing the attention of – as large an audience as possible.

“If you don’t get a certain number of views, you’re not making enough money,” one interviewee said.

Another explained that the people in charge of news channels suspect the public is too politically divided for unbiased journalism to be profitable. “Because there’s so much division now,” the interviewee said, “if a lot of journalists went toward being unbiased they will lose a lot of viewers.”

In other words, people are less likely to see the shift as a sign that those running CBS News now believe what they believe. Viewers are more likely to see it as a sign that the wealthy few who run CBS News are simply charting a new path toward monetizing the audience’s attention.

As one interviewee explained, news that the public encounters often ends up taking the form of “whatever the suits upstairs want journalism and reporting to be.”

A CBS News led by Weiss will likely be a very different network. That doesn’t mean it will find a different audience.

As Lewis and I have learned, and as Ellison and Weiss may soon find, people’s perceptions are a stubborn thing. When it comes to news media, those perceptions are less tied to the journalists themselves and more tied to assumptions about the corporations behind them.

Jacob L. Nelson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. A Bari Weiss-led CBS News would likely look different, but how the public feels about it might not change – https://theconversation.com/a-bari-weiss-led-cbs-news-would-likely-look-different-but-how-the-public-feels-about-it-might-not-change-265245