I had a very productive and stimulating 5 days at the annual conference of the International Communication Association in Denver, CO. It was wonderful to catch up with old friends, make new ones, and hang out with Wayne State Department of Communication alumni and students! I’m especially grateful to the wonderful folk at ICA’s newly formed Activism, Communication and Social Justice Division for awarding me the Top Faculty Paper Award. ❤️🙏🏾
I recently joined a stellar interdisciplinary panel for a symposium, organized by the Wayne State University Humanities Center, to talk about Water/Sheds. We from disciplines as disparate as English, Modern Languages, Biological Sciences, Communication, Civil & Environmental Engineering, and Art, and we talked about why we did the research we did on the social-environmental impacts of water and watersheds. We also identified some wonderful intersections across our research interests and perspectives, which will hopefully lead to us forming a Working Group under the Humanities Center to continue to this conversation and broaden it even further across the university.
The RISE Lab is happy to release a White Paper detailing how institutional authorities in the State of Michigan and City of Detroit addressed water affordability and the mass water shutoffs related to the COVID-19 pandemic. When the first cases of COVID-19, caused by the novel coronavirus, were identified in the United States, community activists appealed to authorities to reverse this shutoff policy. Although the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) urged people to wash their hands regularly for at least 20 seconds to prevent community spread of COVID-19 , activists pointed out that this was impossible for many Detroit residents who lacked running water in their homes. Their pleas were initially dismissed, however, and it was not until March 10, 2020, by when Detroit had emerged as a national epicenter of COVID-19, that Governor Gretchen Whitmer issued executive order EO2020-28 halting water shutoffs and restoring water to disconnected homes. In December 2020, Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan announced that the City would cover outstanding payments through 2022 and permanently end shutoffs, but questions remain about whether these promises will be upheld, if they have not fundamentally changed their language and assumptions of the root problems related to water affordability.
For the August 2020 issue of Management Communication Quarterly, the journal has published an OPEN-ACCESS forum essay where a multicultural team of organizational communication scholars, from different universities, reflected on our collective sense-making of the historic COVID-19 pandemic. The essay builds on personal narratives from each of us on different questions posed by the lead researcher, to create a beautiful mosaic from our words, ideas and feelings. Below, I try to another iteration, by crafting together my fragmented narratives from an earlier, unedited version of the essay, to re-present those forms of expression, to create a new/old essay rooted in praxis. Thank you for reading.
When I began work on the Detroit Water Stories project, back in 2017, I was puzzled why more people living in the city and suburbs were not aware of or perturbed by the mass water shutoffs that had already impacted close to 100,000 households, since 2014. This was, after all, an issue that the United Nations had condemned in no uncertain terms as a major violation of human rights, after the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department started disconnecting water for residents who could not pay their bills — and in the richest country of the world, no less!
I read this news article in The Atlantic this morning noting how Florida Governor Rob DeSantis, who does not have the best record on environmental action and climate change policy, has unveiled a new set of measures to protect the state’s water sources. The article goes on to argue that water is the “one” issue that even traditionally climate action-averse Republican governors cannot avoid. That prompted me to reflect on what is rhetorically distinctive about water insecurity that prompts widespread action. Here are my musings…
Rahul Mitra 