Elexis Trinity Williams is a fifth-year doctoral candidate in science and technology studies from southern California. They earned their A.B. in Africana studies from Brown University and master’s degree in human rights from the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs and now studies oceans history with a focus on human-marine entanglements under the guidance of Sara Pritchard at Cornell.
What is your area of research and why is it important?
As a science and technology studies (STS) scholar working in oceans history, I study human-marine entanglements to better understand how encounters with the oceanic have influenced the production of environmental knowledge and ideas about human history and futures. More specifically, my dissertation examines the emergence of scuba and saturation diving among American oceanographers during the middle of the twentieth century, as increasing exposure to embodied experiences underwater changed the way scientists, technologists, and the public understood both oceans and ourselves. I analyze projects like Jacques Cousteau’s aqua lung, the underwater habitat-laboratory systems of the 1960s and 70s, the rise of sanctuary-based science and advocacy, and NASA’s Extreme Environment Mission Operations Program (NEEMO) to understand how the sensorial intimacies of scientific diving shaped ideas about the oceans and the potentialities of the hybrid or enhanced human body, making of an “extreme” or even hostile environment, a “blue home” for humans. Such projects produced fascinating, sometimes contradictory conceptualizations of marine environs and the more-than-human diving body that reworked and complicated narratives about the frontier and the field, drawing in questions of race, gender, indigeneity, and colonial epistemologies.
What does it mean to you to have been selected for a Zhu Family Graduate Fellowship?
This is an honor that accrues not only to me, but also to my family. As a first-generation college graduate, I worked several jobs to put myself through college, so I know intimately how challenging it can be to juggle research and scholarship with outside responsibilities. It’s made me especially grateful to have been selected for the Zhu Family Graduate Fellowship. I have the freedom to immerse myself fully in my dissertation project, knowing that I have the time and resources to do my best work. I pinch myself all the time when I look up from my notes or my writing and realize that I actually get to spend my days doing this research that I care so deeply about in a dedicated and consistent way. I also started graduate school after working for almost a decade, and with a spouse and a young child at home, being able to balance the demands of intensive research with a healthy lifestyle that allows me to be there at night to tuck my kid in for a bedtime story means the world to me.
Read the full story on the Cornell University Graduate School website.
More News from A&S
