Elexis Trinity (Lex) Collaboration Bio

I am a PhD student in science and technology studies at Cornell University where my developing research interests center around environmental knowledge-making and the construction and exploitation of extreme, hazardous, hostile, or inhospitable environs. While my current projects explore the lives and afterlives of lead mining workscapes in the Tri-State District of Kansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri, and the stationary underwater laboratories of the latter twentieth century, I am more generally interested in thinking with and against the spatialization of the oceans and seas for science, labor, and leisure during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. That said, both projects allow me to explore the tensions between materiality, memory, and desire in living with the ongoing dynamics of disaster, collapse, ruin, and repair.

Before beginning my graduate studies in Ithaca, I worked for six years in Minneapolis as a nonprofit director of community-based participatory research projects and earned a master’s degree in Human Rights with a concentration in Russian and Eurasian studies and a minor field in science, technology, and environmental policy at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs. My research during that period focused on Russian water policy and related human and nonhuman rights issues. With a background in community engagement and participatory methods, I am always excited to think about the ethical dimensions of collaboration, and the relations (and problematics) of obligation, responsibility, and care.