Virtual Summit Submission

University of Hawaiʻi Mānoa
Double Major: Religions and Ancient Civilizations; Political Science; Certificate in Sanskrit

Biography

Nikhil Stewart graduated in August 2025 from the University of Hawaiʻi Mānoa obtaining a double major in Political Science and Religious Tradition with a certificate in Sanskrit. He has worked in the US Senate, written on topics ranging from theoretical linguistics, US politics, to a forthcoming article in Lions Roar magazine about Tibetan Buddhist pilgrimage 'vlogs' and pilgrimage. His current project is an ethnographic study exploring how social media alters life-ways of Tibetan Buddhist monastic communities in the Kathmandu Valley. Given these wide ranging interests, he aspires to achieve a doctorate in Asian Studies, Anthropology or a related field.

Project

Digital Dharma: Tibetan Buddhism and Social Media in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal
This ethnographic study explores the relationship between social media and Tibetan Buddhism in the Kathmandu Valley. Despite the near-ubiquitous use of social media in today’s monastic settings, related scholarly works are almost nonexistent. Social media allows Tibetan monastics to connect regardless of geographic boundaries, serving both religious and political purposes for constituents of the nation in exile. Between June 3rd-August 23, 2025, I interviewed thirty monastics from three representative lineages. Unanimously, monastics used social media on a regular basis. The results indicate that social media has become infrastructurally important in monastic curriculum, pilgrimage, and community. Dually, growing rates of social media ‘addiction,’ exposure to unwanted, overstimulating content, and misinformation threaten monastic life-ways. The conclusion follows that while there are profound benefits to the ubiquity of social media, namely in pedagogy, cultural prosperity, and practice, there also exists, as one monk interviewed suggests, such powerful distractions as to obstruct the very purpose of monastic life-ways.