The Connectivity of Connectedness

V KOSKI-KARRELL

the connectivity of connectedness

2020-21 RICHARD AND LILLIAN IVES GRADUATE FELLOW interview

This interview was part of “What I’m Reading This Week,” a series of fellows interviews conducted by 2020-21 marketing and media intern Nathaniel Liebetreau. See p. 24 for our interview with Nathaniel.

As a queer, nonbinary, Mexican/FinnishAmerican person, V Koski-Karell feels at home in the in-between. V is currently in their seventh year of the U-M Medical Scientist Training Program, where they are completing dual doctoral degrees in medicine and anthropology. During graduate school, they’ve also earned a certificate from the U-M Program in Science, Technology, and Society. Their dissertation project, Following Water: The Poetics of Osmosis in the Wake of Cholera in Haiti, fits within a larger interest into how changes unfold—or what recurs—along membranes marking such alleged binaries as the natural and cultural, human and nonhuman, past and future, ordinary and exceptional, bodies and technology, death and (forms of) life. When not in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, V lives with their partner and dog in Ann Arbor.

N.L.: GOOD MORNING V, THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR DOING THIS INTERVIEW. TO START US OFF, WHAT ARE YOU READING THIS WEEK? V.K.K.: This week, I’m (re)reading In the Wake: On Blackness and Being by Christina Sharpe; Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet edited by Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt; and Plastic Water: The Social and Material Life of Bottled Water by Gay Hawkins, Emily Potter, and Kane Race.

The three books I’m reading this week in many ways jointly undergird the theoretical arguments of a dissertation chapter I’m writing at the moment. Between 2015-2019, I gathered ethnographic data on the cholera epidemic and burgeoning reverse osmosis water market in Haiti. My forthcoming chapter draws on the comments, reflections, and stories people shared with me to suggest that the outbreak of cholera constitutes and perpetuates in Black lives both an “abyssal beginning” of traumatic loss and an “unfolding event” still haunting the waters that people drink.

N.L.: READING OVER PLASTIC WATER: THE SOCIAL AND MATERIAL LIFE OF BOTTLED WATER, IT WAS INFORMATIVE TO LEARN ABOUT HOW WATER BECAME A COMMERCIAL PRODUCT. I CAN SEE HOW YOUR READING CAN COMPLEMENT YOUR THEORETICAL ARGUMENTS FOR YOUR DISSERTATION. ARE TOPICS ON WATER AND