Amber Wutich | |
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Born | |
Alma mater | University of Florida |
Scientific career | |
Institutions | Arizona State University |
Thesis | The effects of urban water scarcity on sociability and reciprocity in Cochabamba, Bolivia (2006) |
Amber Wutich is an American anthropologist who is President's Professor and the Director of the Center for Global Health at Arizona State. Her research considers the impact of water scarcity on human wellbeing. In 2023, she was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and named a MacArthur Fellow.
Wutich was raised in Miramar, Florida. [1] She has said that she was inspired to work on social justice and water scarcity following Hurricane Andrew. [1] She was an undergraduate student at the University of Florida, and spent a year at Shaanxi University of Technology.[ citation needed ] She moved to the University of Florida for her graduate research. Her doctoral research considered the impact of water scarcity on sociability in Cochabamba, and involved a year as a Fulbright scholar in Bolivia. [2] After earning her doctorate, Wutich joined Nancy Grimm at Arizona State University, where she spent one year as a postdoctoral researcher before joining the faculty. [3]
Wutich's early work considered Cochabamba, where water shortages occurred because of migration from a nearby mining community. In 2000, the government tried to privatise its water resources, which drove up prices and resulted in protests. [1] Inadequate planning and infrastructure resulted in a population with limited access to safe water. She developed a methodology to assess and document water needs. She found that the people established their own social water infrastructure, with households self-organizing their own water access and interacting with water vendors. She also found that water insecurity caused considerable distress. She found scarcity is not the primary cause of distress but stigma associated with water negotiations, inequity in access and complicated sharing arrangements drove distress.[ citation needed ] Wutich is Director of the Action for Water Equity Consortium. [4]
Wutich has developed an interdisciplinary, international network focused on water insecurity. She calls her research "justice oriented". [1] She founded the Global Ethnohydrology Study, [5] which collects local knowledge about water insecurity in over twenty countries. She created standardized techniques to collect and analyze data, which involved developing meaningful assessment methods across culturally distinct regions.[ citation needed ]
Arizona State University is a public research university in the Phoenix metropolitan area, Arizona, United States. Founded in 1885 as Territorial Normal School by the 13th Arizona Territorial Legislature, the university is one of the largest public universities by enrollment in the United States. It was one of about 180 "normal schools" founded in the late 19th century to train teachers for the rapidly growing public common schools. Some closed, but most steadily expanded their role and became state colleges in the early 20th century, then state universities in the late 20th century.
Food security is the state of having reliable access to a sufficient quantity of affordable, nutritious food. The availability of food for people of any class and state, gender or religion is another element of food security. Similarly, household food security is considered to exist when all the members of a family, at all times, have access to enough food for an active, healthy life. Individuals who are food-secure do not live in hunger or fear of starvation. Food security includes resilience to future disruptions of food supply. Such a disruption could occur due to various risk factors such as droughts and floods, shipping disruptions, fuel shortages, economic instability, and wars. Food insecurity is the opposite of food security: a state where there is only limited or uncertain availability of suitable food.
The Cochabamba Water War, also known as the Bolivian Water War, was a series of protests that took place in Cochabamba, Bolivia's fourth largest city, between December 1999 and April 2000 in response to the privatization of the city's municipal water supply company SEMAPA. The wave of demonstrations and police violence was described as a public uprising against water prices.
The aim of water security is to make the most of water's benefits for humans and ecosystems. The second aim is to limit the risks of destructive impacts of water to an acceptable level. These risks include for example too much water (flood), too little water or poor quality (polluted) water. People who live with a high level of water security always have access to "an acceptable quantity and quality of water for health, livelihoods and production". For example, access to water, sanitation and hygiene services is one part of water security. Some organizations use the term water security more narrowly for water supply aspects only.
Celia B. Fisher is an American psychologist. She is the Marie Ward Doty professor of ethics at Fordham University in New York City, and director of its Center for Ethics Education. Fisher is also the director of the HIV and Drug Abuse Prevention Research Ethics Training Institute (RETI). Fisher is the founding editor of the journal Applied Developmental Science and serves on the IOM Committee on Clinical Research Involving Children Dr. Fisher has over 300 publications and 8 edited volumes on children’s health research and services among diverse racial/ethnic, sexual and gender minority groups in the U.S. and internationally. She has been funded by NIAAA, NIAID, NICHD, NIDA, NIMHD, and NSF. Fisher is well-known for her federally funded research programs focusing on ethical issues and well-being of vulnerable populations including ethnic minority youth and families, LGBTQ+ youth, persons with HIV and substance use disorders, college students at risk for drinking problems, and adults with impaired consent capacity. Recent publications include research on health equity for BIPOC, LGBTQ+ and economically marginalized children, youth and young adults in areas including social determinants of sexual health, substance use, social media and offline discrimination, mental health and COVID-related distress and racial bias among Asian, Indigenous, Hispanic, Black and White adolescents and adults, and parental COVID-19 pediatric vaccine hesitancy across diverse populations.
Dorceta E. Taylor is an American environmental sociologist known for her work on both environmental justice and racism in the environmental movement. She is the senior associate dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion at Yale School of the Environment, as well as a professor of environmental justice. Prior to this, she was the director of diversity, equity, and inclusion at the University of Michigan's School of Environment and Sustainability (SEAS), where she also served as the James E. Crowfoot Collegiate Professor of Environmental Justice. Taylor's research has ranged over environmental history, environmental justice, environmental policy, leisure and recreation, gender and development, urban affairs, race relations, collective action and social movements, green jobs, diversity in the environmental field, food insecurity, and urban agriculture.
Bruce E. Rittmann is Regents' Professor of Environmental Engineering and Director of the Swette Center for Environmental Biotechnology at the Biodesign Institute of Arizona State University. He was also elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2004 for pioneering the development of biofilm fundamentals and contributing to their widespread use in the cleanup of contaminated waters, soils, and ecosystems.
Sustainable Development Goal 6 declares the importance of achieving "clean water and sanitation for all". It is one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals established by the United Nations General Assembly to succeed the former Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). According to the United Nations, the overall goal is to: "Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all." The goal has eight targets to be achieved by 2030 covering the main areas of water supply and sanitation and sustainable water resource management. Progress toward the targets will be measured by using eleven indicators.
Alexandra Brewis Slade is a New Zealand-American anthropologist, professor, and author who studies how health reflects the interaction of human biology and culture. Her research and community outreach seeks sustainable solutions to complex global health and environmental challenges, such as mental health and water insecurity. She is an advocate for a reduction of stigma in global health practices. She writes under the name Alexandra Brewis.
Sharon J. Hall is an ecosystem ecologist and associate professor at the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University. Her research focuses on ecosystem ecology and the ways that human activity interacts with the environment.
Michelle Ann Manes is an American mathematician whose research interests span the fields of number theory, algebraic geometry, and dynamical systems. She is a professor of mathematics at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and has been a program director for algebra and number theory at the National Science Foundation.
Nancy B. Grimm is an American ecosystem ecologist and professor at Arizona State University. Grimm's substantial contributions to the understanding of urban and arid ecosystem biogeochemistry are recognized in her numerous awards. Grimm is an elected Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, Ecological Society of America, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Dr. Krystal Tsosie (Diné) is a Navajo geneticist and bioethicist at Arizona State University and activist for Indigenous data sovereignty. She is also an educator and an expert on genetic and social identities. Her advocacy and academic work in ameliorating disparities in genetics through community-based participatory research has been covered by various national news sources, including The New York Times, Nova, The Washington Post, NPR, The Atlantic, Forbes, and The Boston Globe.
Anne C. Stone is an American anthropological geneticist and a Regents' Professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University. Her research focuses on population history and understanding how humans and the great apes have adapted to their environments, including their disease and dietary environments. Stone is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a Member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Catherine Panter-Brick is the Bruce A. and Davi-Ellen Chabner Professor of Anthropology, Health, and Global Affairs at Yale University, where she directs the Program on Conflict, Resilience, and Health and the Program on Stress and Family Resilience. She is also the senior editor of the interdisciplinary journal Social Science & Medicine and the President-Elect of the Human Biology Association. She serves as Head of Morse College, one of Yale’s 14 residential colleges, and is Chair of the Council of Heads.
Therese Ann Markow is the Amylin Chair in Life Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. Her research involves the use of genetics and ecology to study the insects of the Sonoran Desert. She was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2001 and the Genetics Society of America George Beadle Award in 2012. Her research received widespread attention for its alleged misuse of Native American genetic data.
Joan B. Silk is an American primatologist, Regents Professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change (SHESC) at Arizona State University. Her research interests include evolutionary anthropology, animal behavior, and primatology. Together with her anthropologist husband, Robert T. Boyd, she wrote the textbook How Humans Evolved.
Tawanna Dillahunt is an American computer scientist and information scientist based at the University of Michigan School of Information. She runs the Social Innovations Group, a research group that designs, builds, and enhances technologies to solve real-world problems. Her research has been cited over 4,600 times according to Google Scholar.
Ximena Vélez Liendo is a Bolivian conservation biologist whose work focus on the ecology of the Andean bear, known as jukumari in aymara language, and its conservation in Bolivia and the rest of South America.
Romina Guadalupe Pérez Ramos is a Bolivian academic, diplomat, politician, and sociologist who served as ambassador of Bolivia to Iran from 2019 to 2020 and since 2021. A member of the Movement for Socialism, she previously served as a party-list member of the Chamber of Deputies from Cochabamba from 2015 to 2019. Pérez graduated as a sociologist from the Higher University of San Simón before completing postgraduate studies in the European Union. She comes from a generation of leftist academics who entered political activity as activists against the military dictatorships of the 1970s and 80s, as well as the neoliberal democratic governments that succeeded them. Her work in the field of women's and ethnic rights led her to join multiple NGOs, including the Center for Legal Studies and Social Research, through which many academics and intellectuals became politically linked with the Movement for Socialism. In 2014, she won a seat in the Chamber of Deputies on the party's electoral list but did not complete her term, being appointed ambassador to Iran in mid-2019.