Congratulations to 2018 University of Toronto Excellence Award Winner: Damien Boltauzer

Congratulations to Woodsworth College student, and 2018 recipient of the University of Toronto Excellence Award in Social Sciences and Humanities, Damien Boltauzer! This $6,000 scholarship provides additional opportunities for research experience to augment the formal research courses and allows undergraduate students to develop an appreciation for the investigative methodology of areas of particular interest!

Damien is pursuing a double major in Religion Studies & Anthropology, and will be conducting ethnographic fieldwork within the Ladakhi Tibetan Buddhist communities in northern India this summer. Over the course of 3 months he will be exploring perceptions of landscape & space, and how these perceptions are framed with the Tibetan Buddhist worldviews of the communities he will be visiting!

 Ladakh is a region that is undergoing significant climactic and social changes. Issues of global climate change are affecting civilians, a concern that is of interest to Damien as he questions how people are coping with these issues and explores how both conservation & ecological practices might be framed within religious understandings of the environment and the world. Damien is particularly interested in notions of ‘sacred space’ and how such conceptualizations might be articulated and acted upon in ritual, economic & ecological practices.