Alexandra Brewis

I co-lead the Culture, Health and Environment Laboratory (CHEL). Some current and recent collaborative research efforts are listed here; I have other current research activities detailed at alexbrewis.org.

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. 

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, the West Bank on gender-based violence, and Zambia on wildlife conservation and community wellbeing.

HWISE: Household Water Insecurity Experiences is a large research collaborative examining water insecurity and its impacts across the globe. Led by funded by Texas A & M geographer Wendy Jepson, and funded by NSF. My role is collabrating on research to understand the contexts and consequences of household water sharing, the connections between food and water insecurity, and other stress related health issues associated with insifficient water.  I also serve on the steering committee. 

REACH-WISER is my newest HWISE collaborative effort (so new we dont have a website yet). REACH is a nine-year global research program (2015 - 24) to improve water security for 10 million poor people in Asia and Africa led by the University of Oxford, and based at eight observatories across three countries (Bangladesh, Ethiopia and Kenya).  We are collaborating on  a massive, innovative cross-country comparative study of how to improve household resiliency to water insecurity. With a large international team that includes anthropologists, geographers, economists, gender and development scholars, water/health/environmental scientists, and many others, this latest round of ambitious, collaborative, trans-disciplinary work advances new models for the direct translation of people's experiences of water insecurity to transnational policy application for improving water and gender development interventions.

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.

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.