Student Spotlight: Elexis Trinity Williams

Elexis Trinity Williams is a fifth-year doctoral candidate in science and know-how research from southern California. They earned their A.B. in Africana research from Brown University and grasp’s diploma in human rights from the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs and now research oceans historical past with a concentrate on human-marine entanglements below the steering of Sara Pritchard at Cornell.

What is your space of analysis and why is it necessary? 

As a science and know-how research (STS) scholar working in oceans historical past, I examine human-marine entanglements to raised perceive how encounters with the oceanic have influenced the manufacturing of environmental information and concepts about human historical past and futures. More particularly, my dissertation examines the emergence of scuba and saturation diving amongst American oceanographers through the center of the 20th century, as growing publicity to embodied experiences underwater modified the best way scientists, technologists, and the general public understood each oceans and ourselves. I analyze tasks like Jacques Cousteau’s aqua lung, the underwater habitat-laboratory programs of the Sixties and 70s, the rise of sanctuary-based science and advocacy, and NASA’s Extreme Environment Mission Operations Program (NEEMO) to know how the sensorial intimacies of scientific diving formed concepts concerning the oceans and the potentialities of the hybrid or enhanced human physique, making of an “extreme” and even hostile atmosphere, a “blue home” for people.  Such tasks produced fascinating, generally contradictory conceptualizations of marine environs and the more-than-human diving physique that reworked and complex narratives concerning the frontier and the sphere, drawing in questions of race, gender, indigeneity, and colonial epistemologies.

What does it imply to you to have been chosen for a Zhu Family Graduate Fellowship?

This is an honor that accrues not solely to me, but additionally to my household. As a first-generation faculty graduate, I labored a number of jobs to place myself by faculty, so I do know intimately how difficult it may be to juggle analysis and scholarship with exterior tasks. It’s made me particularly grateful to have been chosen for the Zhu Family Graduate Fellowship. I’ve the liberty to immerse myself absolutely in my dissertation mission, understanding that I’ve the time and assets to do my greatest work. I pinch myself on a regular basis after I search for from my notes or my writing and understand that I truly get to spend my days doing this analysis that I care so deeply about in a devoted and constant manner. I additionally began graduate faculty after working for nearly a decade, and with a partner and a younger youngster at dwelling, having the ability to stability the calls for of intensive analysis with a wholesome way of life that enables me to be there at night time to tuck my child in for a bedtime story means the world to me.

Read the full story on the Cornell University Graduate School website. 

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