Doctoral Dissertation Research: Measuring Variation in Water Pollution Impacts and Water Insecurity Infrastructures Across Socioeconomic Status

While research has consistently shown how poorer communities as an aggregate tend to bear with the most of negative consequences associated with environmental pollution, less is understood about whether pollution from a common environmental source is differentially experienced along class lines, and if so, to what extent. This research takes place in an urban landscape where both middle- and lower- class residents are impacted by water pollution. The project would train a graduate student in scientific cultural anthropology and its results would be disseminated to academic and non-academic audiences. The project also broadens the participation of historically underrepresented groups in the production of scientific knowledge. The findings will be disseminated to the broader public through public media channels and a photovoice exhibit, as well as non-academic reports to the main stakeholders involved in the study. This project examines perceptions of environmental pollution by measuring variation across a comparative sample of upper-class, gated communities, and informal settlements where lower-income residents live. It also investigates the infrastructures, tools, and behavioral mechanisms enacted by different social groups and individuals to understand the complexities of human-environment interaction. Comparative in nature, this research employs conventional ethnographic methods like semi-structured interviews and participant observation, as well as nontraditional techniques such as walking interviews and photovoice. The project makes important contributions to urban political ecology, theories of water insecurity, and environmental studies and inequality broadly within the fields of geography and anthropology. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.