I co-lead the Culture, Health and Environment Laboratory (CHEL) with Amber Wutich. Some current and recent collaborative research efforts include:

The Global Ethnohydrology Study (PI, Amber Wutich) is a multi-year transdisciplinary project based in our lab using data collected with local communities from around the globe. 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. 

Rethinking Stigma and Global Health is a major synthetic project with Amber Wutich 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. A book is forthcoming with Johns Hopkins University Press.

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. Peggy Ochandarena, former Director of Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning at Chemonics International, is the external co-Director, and I am the ASU director. Signature activities are being conducted in coastal Mozambique on climate change adaptation, Haiti on advancing access to justice, and the West Bank on gender-based violence.

HWISE: Household Water Insecurity Experiences is a large collaborative multi-sited multi-institution study of water insecurity and its impacts across the globe. PIs are A. Wutich, W. Jepson, J. Stoller, and S. Young,  funded by an NSF-RCN to Texas A&M as lead. My role is collabrating on research to understand the contexts and consequences of household water sharing, and the connections between food and water insecurity, and I serve on the steering committee. 

I am PI of Small World/Big Bodies, a cross-cultural, comparative, multi-phased, data-driven study of how and why stigma toward obesity is spreading globally, even as obesity itself becomes more prevalent, and the consequences of this powerful process. The first community-based phases of the project were based in low-income neighborhoods in Phoenix, Arizona in 2006-7. To date, we have collected data in 19 countries, and produced two books and myriad journal articles. Currently, we are focused on a collaborative ethnographically-focused project comparing what it is to live with a large body in four countries (Japan, USA, Paraguay, Samoa). In 2017, our lab launched two new studies of global “fat-talk” with Cindi SturtzSreetharan as lead, one comparing its’ linguistic and social functions and meanings in 9 very diverse countries, and the other as a local Arizona-based citizen science project on bodies, fat-talk, and aging being conducted with seniors. Other recent activities include completed analyses of large secondary datasets from around the globe, including Norway, Korea, and Guatemala.

DevilSPARC Freshman Study tracked 1450 university freshmen and their weight, nutrition and exercise over an academic year, collecting data on multiple aspects of friends and friendship networks. Data collection was completed in mid 2016, and project is now finalizing publications. Nutritionist Meg Bruening is PI.

Living Large and Eyes of the City are two citizen social science projects based in the urban Phoenix area. They use new models of citizen social science to collect hard-to-capture data on how weight stigma shapes daily lives – including people’s exposure to fat-talk, weight-excluding physical environments, and other discrmination. The project considers also how the physical and social challenges of aging, gender, and minority ethnicity intersect with those of weight, working closely with Arizona citizen-collaborators. Linguist Cindi SturtzSrretharan is PI.

Better Post-Bariatric Lives is a recently completed clinic-based study (using ethnography and survey) done in partnership with Mayo Clinic, to understand the role of stigma in shaping weight regain after bariatric surgery. A book-length ethnography is under contract with NYU Press, with Sarah Trainer as lead author.