Spotlights
Ramya Swayamprakash shares her story on growing up in India and her research passions surrounding the Great Lakes and water systems
December 16, 2022
By Maureen Strand
Dr. Ramya Swayamprakash joined the Brooks College of Interdisciplinary Studies faculty in 2022 as a part of the College’s cluster hire cohort. Ramya teaches courses in Digital Studies (DS), Environmental and Sustainability Studies (ENS), and Integrative, Religious, and Intercultural Studies (IRIS). Ramya brings with her a wealth of academic experience and knowledge about a wide array of disciplines. Her journey from growing up in India to landing in Grand Rapids as a part of our GVSU community has been filled with extremely valuable opportunities that make her a uniquely qualified and welcome addition to Brooks College.
Ramya was surrounded by education while growing up in India. Both her mother and grandmother were schoolteachers. She grew up being encouraged to learn and her family fostered her curiosity about the world and how it works. As she worked her way through high school, she began to recognize that she disliked focusing on textbooks as a way of learning. The things she learned did not seem to relate much to her real life or teach her valuable skills. She much preferred real-world experience and engaged thinking exercises.
She attended the University of Mumbai in India for her undergraduate degree on mass media with an emphasis in journalism. There, she developed a valuable mentor relationship with her program director. He was immensely committed to education, and he inspired her to think about teaching as a profession. He made teaching seem fun and fulfilling. His influence motivated Ramya to pursue graduate school and become a professor herself.
At Jawaharlal Nehru University in India, Ramya pursued two separate graduate degrees. First, she completed her Master of Arts program in their Center for Political Studies in 2008, and then completed the Master of Philosophy program at the Center for Studies in Science Policy in 2012. She was part of an elite class of students, as thousands were applying to her programs, and only 60 were selected. “In that program, I had access to some of the smartest people in the world, with whom I could engage, debate, and critique,” says Ramya. “That experience expanded my intellectual horizons like nothing else. I was pushed to work harder than I ever had. It helped me get acquainted with things bigger than myself, in ways that I hadn’t before.”
After the intellectually invigorating experience at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Ramya felt driven to pursue her PhD. At that point, she accepted a position as a visiting fellow at Yale University in the United States. Ramya found that, while the environment at Yale was certainly prestigious and opulent, it felt a bit out of step with the real world. In her experience, the exclusivity created its own series of problems. After her experience at Yale, Ramya decided to first take a break from academia to figure out which direction she wanted to head in. For 18 months, she worked with a nonprofit in India which focused on increasing public transit and improving general transportation access to those in India and the world in general. She gained valuable experience in recognizing how these local issues rippled out to affect the global community. However, she ultimately realized that she missed academia. She decided to attend Lawrence Technological University in Southfield, Michigan. Her experience with the nonprofit influenced her decision to pursue the master’s program for Urban Design.
The first time Ramya flew to Detroit she also caught sight of one of the Great Lakes for the first time. Lake Michigan was spectacular in all its splendor. Nothing prepared her for seeing it from the sky. She was mesmerized by its sheer scale and beauty, and fascinated to observe the rivers and channels that were snaking off the large lake. In India, she learned facts about the Great Lakes, and their importance to the global fresh water supply. But in that moment she was struck with an intense curiosity about those rivers and channels. She had never heard of the Detroit River or any of the various features that were integrated with the Great Lakes. From the sky, she also caught a glimpse of a large island that appeared unnatural in the Detroit River. She wondered about its origins. She wondered about the people living around this stunning geographical wonder. Ramya couldn’t wait to get started with her research.
Her thesis at Lawrence Tech focused on re-conceiving the U.S.-Canada border along the Detroit River, examining the divide as infrastructure, and therefore proposing conceptual design opportunities that would celebrate the commonalities as well as cultural congruencies between the two nations. During her thesis, she discovered more artificial islands, dams, and channels within the Detroit River that look natural because they have trees and foliage. The water quality was even better in some of these areas due to the ecosystem that had developed. But she was shocked to discover that the army corps of engineers had been drudging polluted sediment for the last 100 years to create these unnatural islands. She discovered there was a great deal of controversy with this practice. She was fascinated by the evolution of the river, and what it meant for U.S.-Canada relations.
Ramya learned that the progression of the changes from the 1870’s to the age of environmentalism has impacted the way people are understanding, interacting with, and changing the river. As infrastructures were added to the natural environment, it began to shift the relationship people had with the river, whether it is an island, dike, or channel, people’s relationship with the river changed. Most people think of the Great Lakes and their features as being all natural. But when you start following these little islands and dams, you begin to see the way that the massive human footprint has impacted the natural environment. The creation of locks and shipping channels have had a huge impact on the lakes, including the introduction of invasive species. Dredging has also impacted the natural sediment of the lakes and the water levels. Dredging, new channels and islands, and border relations became the basis of her doctoral project.
Following the completion of her master’s program at Lawrence Tech in 2016, Ramya began her PhD at Michigan State University where she taught courses in interdisciplinary studies. Being in Michigan, she benefited from the company of truly generous people—on both sides of the border—whether it was supervisors or intellectuals at large, with whom she was able to spend extended periods of time interacting with. Through these relationships, she learned about history, politics, how people think, and how students best learn.
Two mentors during her time at MSU were not on her doctoral committee. Instead, they were people who understood her unique struggles with managing a teaching position while pursuing further education. They were extremely authentic in their approach. They were committed to challenging students intellectually and pushing them to expand their horizons, even if it was uncomfortable at times. It completely changed the way that Ramya approached pedagogy. Their methods taught her a way to help meet students where they are at and raise them up without holding them to unrealistic goals which didn’t help anyone and might discourage further academic pursuits.
Ramya’s dissertation was titled Freshwater Frontier: Island Making, Dredging, and Infrastructure in the Detroit River. Ramya found that studying the evolution of the Detroit River is a telling case study for the fate of the Great Lakes, as they are all connected, and impact each other and the world at large. She felt that awareness of these issues is incredibly important, because when the river is changed, the lakes are changed. Dredging from the 1870s to the 1960s lowered the lake levels drastically.
At that point in her life, Ramya reflected that the old models of academia work in ways which were not necessarily providing students with a set of skills that they could effectively utilize in the real world. This led her to search for a new teaching opportunity. She had dabbled in several disciplines and methodologies, to have a more rounded view of existence. And she was looking for an institution which more closely aligned with her approach to education. When she first found the posting for a position within Brooks College of Interdisciplinary Studies at Grand Valley State University, her sister was visiting, and Ramya told her sister it sounded too good to be true. The position was still in Michigan, so she would not have to move far. She began to inquire with colleagues about GVSU. She was pleased to hear so many positive things. Everyone she spoke with seemed to have genuinely good memories and great things to say about their experience at GVSU. GVSU also had a reputation for fostering adult learning, which is a passion for Ramya. While pursuing PhD she really thought about how she would be able to help students differently and empower them in their lives. She applied and was thrilled to be offered the position. She started teaching in the Fall 2022 semester.
“Brooks is a great fit for me,” says Ramya. “Being able to think from an interdisciplinary perspective without having to defend a particular territory is refreshing. I am not here to guard information; I am here to make it accessible and help students create their own path. It’s rare to find, because interdisciplinary studies can be difficult to foster, it is hard to do it in a way that creates an enabling environment for students. Everyone in Brooks is so human and real and deals in kindness and consideration.”
The unique approach of Brooks allowed her to have a very creative midterm where she challenged her students to create their own columns outdoors on the sidewalk with chalk. “I realized during the pandemic that I am a workaholic, still struggling with work life balance,” says Ramya. “I constantly feel like I should be more fun, but my work is fun, so I don’t know what else to do to be fun!”
Ramya is currently pursuing several areas of research in addition to her teaching position at GVSU. She is working on a book chapter on hydraulic dam engineers in postcolonial India, as one of her master’s degrees was focused on science policy studies, where she examined hydro engineers and the water bureaucracy in India. “Many large dams were created to help electricity generation when India was a newly independent country,” says Ramya. “I wrote an article on that and now am writing a chapter which looks at how engineers are educated in India, and how that gave them a sense of intellectual equality with their colonial masters, and what that meant for the ways they were able to navigate their postcolonial reality.” India is a hotbed of hydraulic engineering design. Hydraulic engineering as a discipline did not evolve until much later in the 19th century, and one of the largest engineering colleges for hydraulic engineering is in India. British engineers went to India and learned concepts and real-life applications. The designs originating in India can be seen all over the world, from the Aswan Dam in Egypt to the biggest dams in South Asia. She is hoping to expand to additional chapters on engineers and their expertise moving at a transnational scale between India, the United States, and Canada. There is a great deal of knowledge flow between engineers across the world, so studying engineers in a comparative perspective adds to the way we understand the creation of dams across the world.
Following another vein of her Great Lakes research, Ramya is examining the history of the Great Lakes borderlands culture and how citizens have understood the idea of the improvements to the lakes. There has been a lack of general knowledge of the factual environmental impact to the Great Lakes of concepts such as dredging. And there has always been controversy with these changes. She is particularly interested in how local newspapers have reported on the idea of improvements, as well as how much of a voice has been given to the common people to raise concerns or even object to changes that could have a detrimental effect. Particularly, newspapers in the late 19th century were extremely partisan in favor of dredging and other actions that could potentially harm the health of the lakes.
Upon relocating to the Grand Rapids area, she quickly discovered the Grand River. Much like her fascination with the Detroit River, she began to research, and discovered there did not seem to be a comprehensive history of the Grand River. Her most recent research project will involve creating such a history. She wants to have more student engagement and participation on creating data sets about the river. Her project will involve citizen science, where students will go out and obtain water samples to measure it over time to create the data sets. The project will also involve gathering historical accounts from the local community to create a base of knowledge about the Grand River’s history. She will examine how the Grand River is changing, and where. For the Fall 2022 semester, she had her ENS students go to the Grand River and write a weekly reflection of what they observed from the same spot each week and observe changes in and around the river from their perspective. They noticed changes in the water quality and the activity in and around the water. The hope is that they can come to understand the river better, as well as teach students how to be mindful of their local environment and the changes. Ramya would love to see the creation of a Grand River Research Collective at GVSU. Ramya, along with Dr. Peter Wampler, was awarded the inaugural Brooks Interdisciplinary Collaboration Grant to conduct student-led water quality data collection along the lower Grand River.
Ramya recently contested (and won) elections to the H-Net Council. Humanities & Social Sciences Online: H-Net is an online consortium sponsoring 200 free interactive networks which reach over 100,000 subscribers in more than 90 countries through all its channels. Ramya is also on the executive council of the Network in Canadian History and Environment (NiCHE), a Canadian-based confederation of educators and researchers. NiCHE is an active intellectual community and one of the most frequented websites on environmental history in the world. Ramya is an assistant executive editor for Environmental History Now, an award-winning public history website. Lastly, Ramya is a co-host of Heartland History- the official podcast of the Midwestern History Association.
Ramya has a three-year-old son, so her work life balance takes extra effort to maintain. For Ramya, being a single parent who is an immigrant without any immediate family in the vicinity makes life a bit more complicated. “I have been extremely lucky to have good friends from graduate school in the Grand Rapids area, but it is a difficult thing to balance, and nobody warned me how exhausting parenting would be. I am grateful for the support.” Her parenting philosophy, like her pedagogy, is about critical engagement. “There are days I want my child to listen to me. But 9 times out of 10, I do not want my child to take my word for it. I always want him to ask questions and be curious and understand why he is doing what he is doing.” Ramya prefers to allow the natural learning process to solidify his ability to think logically about why he should or should not do something. Growing up in India, there was a lot of structural control around behavior. She emphasizes to her son that he should be kind, but he does not have to be nice. “There is a difference. It is kindness that will change the world. Whatever you do, do it conscientiously and with honesty. I want my child to question everything. And I want my child to be kind.”
Ramya’s approach to her life is truly inspiring. She brings a rich diversity of experiences and knowledge to our community. And she has been an enthusiastic participant of Brooks College community events. She is always willing to have conversations with anyone and expand her experience. Her approach underscores her values. And we are very grateful that she chose to join GVSU.
For more on Ramya Swayamprakash, check out her interview on the WGVU Morning Show with Shelley Irwin.