Alexandra Brewis

Much of my research activity is based in the Culture, Health and Environment Laboratory (CHELab) which I co-lead with three other anthropologists. Some of our current and recent collaborative research efforts are listed below; more detail on research and training activities in the CHELab detailed at alexbrewis.org. I am always exploring new ideas and collaborations or branching off to learn new skills, so the research foci shifts from year to year. Here are some of our core projects that are ongoing efforts: 

The Global Ethnohydrology Study is a multi-year transdisciplinary project based in our lab using data collected with local communities from around the globe, drawing on the water expertise of Amber Wutich. The goal is to better theorize how people understand and adapt to the everyday challenges of climate changes, such as getting enough safe water, and to explicate the health and psychological impacts of that struggle. This is one of the primary projects students in our lab collaborate on, learning social science research skills, and also where we test new methods to systematically collect varied forms of cultural data.

Global Impact Collaboratory (GIC) is about testing of new methods how we know when development projects are actually “working” from the perspectives of the people on the ground they are meant to serve. The GIC was designed with Peggy Ochandarena, former Director of Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning at Chemonics International. Our signature test-bed activities conducted in collaboration with USAID projects to date include: coastal Mozambique on climate change adaptation, Haiti on advancing access to justice, the West Bank on gender-based violence, and Zambia on wildlife conservation and community wellbeing. The GIC allows me to experiment with how anthropology can really "make a difference" in real world applications. 

HWISE: Household Water Insecurity Experiences is a large international research collaborative examining water insecurity and its impacts across the globe. HWISE is led by funded by Texas A & M geographer Wendy Jepson, and funded by NSF. My research focus is the contexts and consequences of household water sharing, the connections between food and water insecurity, and other stress related health issues associated with insufficient water.  I have been partnering in this field research with Haramaya University in Ethiopia.  I also serve on the HWISE steering committee with responsibilities for early career mentoring. Much of my collaborations on policy work is in the space. 

Rethinking Stigma and Global Health is a major synthetic project that explores how stigma is deployed accidentally and purposefully as a public health tool, using cases of hygiene, mental health, and obesity. This is about revealing the unintended consequences for creating illness and reinforcing poverty around the globe, and identifies strategies to address it. Much of my media/public science communication work is in this area. 

Small World/Big Bodies is a cross-cultural, comparative, multi-phased, data-driven study of how and why stigma toward obesity is spreading globally, even as body weights increase, and the consequences of this powerful process. The first community-based phases of the project were in Phoenix, Arizona in 2006-7. To date, we have collected data in 19 countries, and produced three books and myriad journal articles.  We recently completed a longitudinal ethnographic study, in collaboration with Mayo Clinic, on the social dimensions of weight loss surgery. Other activities include newer studies of global “fat-talk”, comparing its’ linguistic and social functions and meanings in diverse countries, and local Arizona-based citizen science project on bodies, fat-talk, and aging (both following the lead of linguistic anthropologist Cindi SturtzSreetharan). Other recent activities include completed analyses of large secondary datasets from around the globe, including Norway, Korea, and Guatemala. Much of my student training in research methods in is this area. 

Teaching Better Anthropology. Working with multiple colleagues in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change, I am engaged in a long-term effort to innovate, test, and improve the teaching of anthropology as a relevant, impactful discipline. This includes collaboration on efforts to test which innovations in courses and training activities can improve structural competency of pre-health students and clarify the long-term impacts of study abroad and other forms of experiential education and how to best advance ethnographic methods training as a field, and developing a Introduction to Anthropology textbook (with me as lead author, with WW Norton Publishers) that reflects and synthesizes recent innovations across the four-fields on how an engaged and responsible anthropology should and can be done. I follow the lead of educational anthropologist Alissa Ruth in much of this work.