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.

Resources

Cities@Tufts Lectures explores the impact of urban planning on our communities and the opportunities to design for greater equity and justice with professor Julian Agyeman.

Cities@Tufts Lectures is produced by Tufts University and Shareable.net with support from Barr Foundation,

Paige Kelly is our co-producer and audio editor. The original portrait of Ashanee Kottage was illustrated by Jess Milner. The series is co-produced and hosted by Tom Llewellyn.

"Light Without Dark" by Cultivate Beats is our theme song.

Since the emergence of the Environmental Justice movement, maps have been pivotal tools in revealing patterns of environmental and social inequality, in legitimizing what many communities already knew – that power and oppression shape the landscape of opportunity and risk.

Mapping remains critical to Environmental Justice activism, research, and policy. Maps are often employed as tools of accountability, and as a result, mapping is both a technical and a political act, facing both technical and political challenges.

Within the current political climate, these challenges have been magnified, but they are not new. They are familiar and pernicious obstacles to the larger movement for social justice.

And they share a common root – a resistance to naming and confronting the role of racism and other forms of social and political marginalization that sustain the inequitable landscape of privilege and oppression.

This is a discussion about how that resistance is manifested, how it challenges the task of mapping in environmental justice research and policy, and reflections on what it means to meaningfully engage with environmental justice mapping as a technical and political act.

Professor Marcos Luna joined the Geography and Sustainability Department at Salem State University in 2004. I received my Ph.D. in Urban Affairs and Public Policy with a concentration in Technology, Environment, and Society from the University of Delaware in 2007. I received my M.A. in Geography from California State University, Los Angeles, in 2000. Before coming to Salem State University, I worked as an Environmental Analyst for the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection, and before that, as a NASA-funded GIS consultant for Native American tribes in the Southwest and Northwest. I have participated in various health and environmental research and public service projects in Massachusetts, Delaware, and California, as well as at the national level.

Resources

• Cities@Tufts Lectures explores the impact of urban planning on our communities and the opportunities to design for greater equity and justice with professor Julian Agyeman.
• Cities@Tufts Lectures is produced by Tufts University and Shareable.net with support from Barr Foundation,
• Paige Kelly is our co-producer and audio editor. The original portrait of Marcos Luna was illustrated by Jess Milner. The series is co-produced and hosted by Tom Llewellyn.
• "Light Without Dark" by Cultivate Beats is our theme song.

Where would you take someone on a guided tour of your neighborhood? In her recent book, The Cities We Need (MIT Press), photographer and urbanist Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani introduces us to the complex, political, and eminently personable stories of residents who answered this question in Brooklyn, New York, and Oakland, California. Their universal stories and Bendiner-Viani's evocative images illuminate what's at stake in our everyday places—from diners to churches to donut shops. In this culmination of two decades of research and art practice, Bendiner-Viani intertwines the personal, historical, and photographic to present us with placework, the way that unassuming places foster a sense of belonging and, in fact, do the essential work of helping us become communities.

In this talk exploring her unique book, Bendiner-Viani makes visible how seemingly unimportant places can lay the foundation for a functional interconnected society, so necessary for both public health and social justice. The Cities We Need explores both what we gain in these spaces and how we risk losing both our senses of self and our democracy as they are threatened by gentrification, large-scale development, public health threats, and climate change. Ultimately, Bendiner-Viani shows us how to understand ourselves as part of a shared society, with a shared fate; she shows us that everyday places can be the spaces of liberation in which we can build the cities we need.

• More about The Cities We Need
• More about Gabrielle's work and her practice, Buscada

About the speaker

Dr. Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani is a writer, artist, and cofounder of the interdisciplinary studio on place and dialogue, Buscada. She is the author of The Cities We Need: Essential Stories of Everyday Places (MIT Press, 2024) and Contested City: Art and Public History as Mediation at New York's Seward Park Urban Renewal Area (University of Iowa Press, 2019), a finalist and honoree for the MAS Brendan Gill Award. A widely exhibited photographer, she was a professor of urban studies at the New School for a decade and has been a fellow at both the International Center of Photography in New York and the Centre for Urban Community Research at Goldsmiths, University of London. She holds a doctorate in environmental psychology from the Graduate Center, CUNY.

Resources

• Cities@Tufts Lectures explores the impact of urban planning on our communities and the opportunities to design for greater equity and justice with professor Julian Agyeman.
• Cities@Tufts Lectures is produced by Tufts University and Shareable.net with support from Barr Foundation,
• Paige Kelly is our co-producer and audio editor. The original portrait of Dan O'Brien was illustrated by Jess Milner. The series is co-produced and hosted by Tom Llewellyn.
• "Light Without Dark" by Cultivate Beats is our theme song.