Commencement 2023
Graduation speech by Nina Kumar '23
To the families, friends and faculty, it is an honor to stand before you as a student speaker for the Anthropology commencement as a proud member of the class of 2023.
My name is Nina Kumar, and I am a double major in Anthropology and HSSP with a minor in Latin American, Caribbean and Latinx studies.
My journey with anthropology begins with an ethnographic vignette, as most anthropologists tend to do.
On my first day of classes in freshman year, I sat down in a surprisingly bright classroom in the Brown building and started my college career off with a class on Decoloniality and Indigenous Anthropology with Professor Lee Bloch. I had no idea what anthropology entailed, but the first quote I heard that day told me that I had found my calling.
We read a quote from Linda Tuihiwai Smith, a prominent Maori Scholar, stating: "Research for social justice expands and improves the conditions for justice; it is an intellectual, cognitive and moral project, often fraught, never complete, but worthwhile.”
As a third culture kid who has spent the majority of my life in India and Zambia, I had always been innately curious about the role culture plays in shaping who we are and how we interact with the world around us. Anthropology gave me the power to name those concepts and to weave them into my academic and personal experiences.
It equipped me with the tools to understand the importance of creating culturally appropriate health interventions while engaging in ethical research, which found its way into my research on HIV and social stigma among women in Tanzania and cultural competency training among health care workers in the U.S.
This department and faculty put the utmost care and effort into supporting students, which has absolutely amazed me throughout the past four years. From Professor Javier Urcid coming in on his days off to the human osteology lab to teach me the difference between tailbones and toe bones to Professors Ferry and Alvarez Astacio mentoring me through politics and Latin American culture, this department has nurtured me to grow in more ways than I could have imagined.
In the next chapter of my life, I will be a research specialist at a health consulting firm in Boston, conducting interviews with patients experiencing chronic illnesses, where I envision my ethnographic research training will come in handy. I would like to thank the incredible role models, mentors and friends I have made in the anthropology department and their role in helping me on my journey.
I am constantly impressed by the academic achievements of my anthropology cohort, and I have no doubt that every graduate in this room is on their way to accomplishing amazing things, using our anthropological backgrounds to create impactful changes in the communities around us.