The Just Us Graduate Student Dinners emerged from a recognition of the quiet crisis of food insecurity and isolation that many graduate students—especially Global Majority, low-income, first-generation, and international students—experience.
Academia often disembodies students, extracting them from their cultural food traditions and support networks while offering little institutional concern for whether they are nourished in mind and body.
Just Us was conceived with a dual goal: to surface mutual aid networks that already exist among students while also advocating for institutional change to better support graduate student food security. Through shared meals and facilitated conversations, participants will unearth stories of food traditions, articulate their needs, and organize for concrete changes—whether through meal plans, stipends, or alternative food access programs.
By partnering with campus affinity centers and guest facilitators who offer their own food stories as an invitation to dialogue, Just Us seeks to be more than just a meal—it is a movement toward re-rooting students in a sense of belonging, collective care, and food justice advocacy within the university.
About the Speaker
Ashanee Kottage is a theater maker, poet, and scholar from Colombo, Sri Lanka, and the founder of Kavaya Press—an artist collective and sustainable publishing home for writers of the Global Majority responding to their environments.
Her debut poetry collection Sand & Sweat traces a coming-of-age across continents, while her academic scholarship explores the journey of coming-of-place. With a degree from Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service and a Master’s in progress at Tufts in Sustainability, Ashanee approaches community gatherings and art making as both city-scale advocacy and national diplomacy. She is currently based between Boston and Colombo, working on her first film, Lunu Rekha, a meditation on tourism's impact on the south coast of Sri Lanka.
