Kaya Prasad ’19

How campus community connects to the world community.

“That understanding has been deepened and nuanced in my time at Grinnell. I developed some really profoundly good and formative relationships with people I wouldn’t necessarily have expected to. Coming in with that openness allowed those relationships to happen.”
— Kaya Prasad ’19

Coming to Grinnell, Kaya Prasad ’19 brought the perspective that she could learn something from everyone.

“I wanted to have this openness to engage with anyone I encountered,” she says. “That understanding has been deepened and nuanced in my time at Grinnell. I developed some really profoundly good and formative relationships with people I wouldn’t necessarily have expected to. Coming in with that openness allowed those relationships to happen.”

At Grinnell, Prasad took on an independent major studying global and community development.

Sensing that the best way to learn about global development was to witness it firsthand, Prasad took advantage of the numerous international learning opportunities available to Grinnell students through the Institute for Global Engagement (IGE).

Prasad toured Singapore and participated in a language-immersion semester in Kunming, China, where she studied the impacts of social, economic, and religious policy on communities. She also performed volunteer work in Cambodia and Costa Rica through another campus organization.

“At Grinnell, I had an interest fostered in learning about the dynamics of community formation. Some of that came from my coursework in cultural anthropology and sociology, and some came from the community itself,” she says. “I was able to consider the various lines along which humans divide ourselves and the lines along which we choose to associate with each other. I was able to explore those lines, how much of this is conditioned, how much is dictated by policy, and then question how much we can, despite our natural inclinations, form communities that are healthy and how much do we mediate that through intentional choices that go against our natural inclinations.”

To further get the word out about the benefits of a global education, Prasad took on a role as an IGE global envoy. She provided peer advising to students interested in off-campus study, internships, and other global opportunities. These programs help students embrace and appreciate differences and lead to greater cultural awareness and respect.

Shaped by the community and the relationships she built at Grinnell, Prasad says she learned to value the differences in people’s identities.

“Grinnell is open to students creating those pockets of comfortable belonging inside of a broader more diverse belonging we have to navigate,” Prasad says. “I learned to look for people I have commonalities and can engage easily, but also to seek to build community with people who are different from me. It’s worth doing the work to find common ground even though it’s not as obvious.”

To cap her Grinnell studies, Prasad performed a dance titled “Negotiating Boundaries: Identity and Exile,” which integrated auto-ethnography, theological studies, and choreography to tell a multi-layered story about identity and belonging.

To create the movement for her performance, Prasad selected texts from the Hebrew Bible and Christian Scriptures that speak to the theme of exile and identity on national, religious, and spiritual levels. To explain these themes, Prasad conducted interviews with family members about immigration and living in a multicultural family.

“I dance to connect my body to my surroundings, my thoughts to my emotions, and myself to the world I inhabit and the other people in it,” Prasad wrote in her final project. “The process of creating a dance by generating movement material, writing text, and weaving the two together allows me to engage both bodily and intellectually with my subject matter and come to a deeper understanding of it.”