Melissa Beresford
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 72637 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Melissa Beresford |
| NOMBRES | Melissa |
| APELLIDO | Beresford |
| FIRMA | BERESFORD M |
| AFILIACIONES | San Jose State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5707-3943 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 43 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 119 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 43 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2014 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
Teaching and Learning Participatory Methods in Anthropology
Participatory methods in cultural anthropology continue to gain popularity. These methods respect community values and promote empowerment and co-creation, enhancing the ethicality and relevance of research findings. Despite their advantages, formal training in participatory methods is limited in anthropology programs, often leaving anthropologists to learn through trial and error with community partners. This article provides an overview of comm…
Mentoring in the social science laboratory
Graduate research programs aim to cultivate students’ abilities to conduct scientific research, including theory development and application, research design, data analysis, and transferable skills like collaboration and communication. Historically, social science training has emphasized individual rather than team-based work. This may limit knowledge creation and negatively impact student confidence and overall mental health. With a growing emph…
How to organise undergraduate lab training
The impacts of undergraduate research experiences are multiple and varied. Working in traditional laboratories (e.g. in the bench sciences) fosters many skills, including independence and critical thinking. Likewise, social science laboratories demonstrate important impacts on students with regard to clarification of career paths, understanding the research process, fostering a systems thinking approach to complex problems, and the ability to ana…
Addressing Failing Water Systems
It is increasingly acknowledged that high income countries do not enjoy universal drinking water coverage, with pockets of water insecurity persisting close to areas that have had high-quality, centralized water provision for half a century or more. The reasons behind this are complex, and effective ways to improve water security in these areas defy simple prescriptions. Nuanced measures that disaggregate the different facets of water insecurity …
Disaster Schooling Experiences and Emergent Crises
This paper examines the disaster schooling experiences of Puerto Rican educators, families, and students across multiple crises following Hurricane Maria. Drawing on 11 months of ethnographic research, we analyze how schooling unfolded across disasters and how long‐standing vulnerabilities and structural inequalities shaped responses. Findings reveal the significant role of schools and educators in supporting children and underscore the need for …
Comparing methods for research mentorship
Recent research finds that a classic approach to research mentorship – the Socratic method – where faculty foster learning by posing probing questions, can also create gender and racial disparities in learning gains. A newer research mentorship method, the Critical Response Process (CRP), may address these shortcomings by giving students control over the flow and quality of feedback they receive. We test and compare the efficacy of these two meth…
Value Propositions Provide a Roadmap for Teaching Doctoral Students How to Develop Research Proposals
Writing winning proposals for funding research is an essential skill for doctoral students in the social sciences. Still, most anthropology programs lack formal instruction on this, relying instead on informal mentorship. To advance this, we evaluated the Value Proposition framework in teaching anthropology Ph.D. students to write proposals. Our findings from the feedback from students and faculty in the NSF-funded Cultural Anthropology Methods P…
Ethical challenges of managed retreat from centralized water systems
Sample Sizes for 10 Types of Qualitative Data Analysis
There has been a recent explosion of articles on minimum sample sizes needed for analyzing qualitative data. The purpose of this integrated review is to examine this literature for 10 types of qualitative data analysis (5 types of saturation and 5 common methods). Building on established reviews and expanding to new methods, our findings extract the following sample size guidelines: theme saturation (9 interviews; 4 focus groups), meaning saturat…
Can household water sharing advance water security? An integrative review of water entitlements and entitlement failures
An increasing number of studies find that water sharing-the non-market transfer of privately held water between households-is a ubiquitous informal practice around the world and a primary way that households respond to water insecurity. Yet, a key question about household water sharing remains: is water sharing a viable path that can help advance household water security? Or should water sharing be understood as a symptom of water in security in …
Methods Training for Practicing Anthropologists
It is imperative for anthropology Ph.D. programs to equip students with essential research skills applicable to both academic and non-academic careers. Here we highlight the NSF Cultural Anthropology Methods Program (CAMP), a 3-week intensive training initiative aimed at enhancing students' preparedness as research professionals. The program integrates intensive methodological instruction with personalized mentorship to guide students in refining…
Scaling up Through Online Research Mentorship – Lessons Learned
The NSF Cultural Anthropology Methods Program (CAMP) first iteration was a hybrid virtual model due to the world pandemic. Drawing on established pedagogical principles, the program combined asynchronous lectures with synchronous online instruction, hands-on activities, and mentorship sessions. The curriculum encompassed a diverse range of activities, including research project development and problem-solving exercises. Despite the benefits of vi…
The New NSF Camp Feedback Method for Research Mentorship
The National Science Foundation's Cultural Anthropology Methods Program (CAMP) aims to cultivate students' ability to craft competitive research proposals. Over three years of CAMP, we tested and iterated different feedback models: the Socratic method, the Value Proposition approach, and the Critical Response Process (CRP). We ultimately designed the NSF CAMP Feedback Method that integrates successful elements from these three models for the pres…
New Teaching in Participatory Methods for Practicing Anthropology
Anthropologists are moving away from viewing anthropology as a solitary affair towards collaborative research, which values knowledge co-production with community members from research design to data analysis and write-up. By including the people who know most about the field site, participatory research seeks to confront power imbalances and advance social change. Building the capacity of students to fully engage with community partners is criti…
Building an Inclusive Big Tent for Methods
Creating a Community of Practice has been central to the vision of the NSF Cultural Anthropology Methods Program (CAMP). The CAMP Community of Practice explores the practices of doing research and teaching research methods, drawing on the great diversity of methods used by anthropologists who collect and analyze cultural data. The methodological diversity now represented in CAMP reflects exciting developments in our discipline, but it also poses …
Community-based Participant-observation (CBPO)
Community-based participant-observation purposefully combines participant-observation and community-based participatory research. While participant-observation is the core method of ethnography and foundational to cultural anthropology, community-based participatory research initially emerged from health and related applied sciences to align researchers' and communities' agendas through focused collaboration. Participant-observation and community…
Deep hanging out, mixed methods toolkit, or something else? Current ethnographic practices in US anthropology
We use a mix of qualitative and quantitative analyses to examine 1354 survey responses from members of the American Anthropological Association about their practice and teaching of cultural anthropology research methods. Latent profile analysis and an examination of responses to open-ended survey questions reveal distinctive methodological clustering among anthropologists. However, two historical approaches to ethnography remain prominent: deep h…
Ethnographic methods
American anthropology is engaged in significant self-reckonings that call for big changes to how anthropology is practiced. These include (1) recognizing and taking seriously the demands to decolonize the ways research is done, (2) addressing precarious employment in academic anthropology, and (3) creating a discipline better positioned to respond to urgent societal needs. A central role for ethnographic methods training is a thread that runs thr…
A systems perspective on water markets
Garrick, Dustin; Balasubramanya, Soumya; Beresford, Melissa; Wutich, Amber; Gilson, Gina G; Jorgensen, Isabel; Brozovic, Nicholas; Cox, Michael; Dai, Xiaoping; Erfurth, Sophie; Rimšaitė, Renata; Svensson, Jesper; Jones, Julia Talbot; Unnikrishnan, Hita; Wight, Charles; Villamayor Tomás, Sergio; Mendoza, Karla Vazquez
Research supervisors and undergraduate students’ perceived gains from undergraduate research experiences in the social sciences
Undergraduate research experiences (UREs) enhance student retention, provide transferrable skills, and prepare students for advanced graduate study. The majority of these benefits, however, are concentrated within the natural and biological sciences; disciplines with historical under-representation of non-male students. If offered in the social sciences, UREs would be more accessible to women, students of colour, and first-generation students. Bu…
Ethnographic Methods Training Norms and Practices and the Future of American Anthropology
American Anthropology is engaged in significant self-reckonings that call for big changes to how anthropology is practiced. These include (1) recognizing and taking seriously the demands to decolonize the ways research is done; (2) addressing precarious employment in academic anthropology; and (3) creating a discipline better positioned to respond to urgent societal needs. A central role for ethnographic methods training is a thread that runs thr…
Water Sharing as Disaster Response
In 2017, Hurricane María left more than a third of Puerto Rican households without water services. Cascading failures—including the simultaneous collapse of water, electricity, and transportation sectors—presented serious challenges to the timely restoration of governmental services. In response, families across Puerto Rico adopted self-organized coping strategies to obtain the basic resources they needed, including safe and sufficient water. Dra…
Participatory Modeling
Participatory modeling (PM) is an engaged research methodology for creating analog or computer-based models of complex systems, such as socio-environmental systems. Used across a range of fields, PM centers stakeholder knowledge and participation to create more internally valid models that can inform policy and increase engagement and trust between communities and research teams. The PM process also presents opportunities for knowledge co-product…
Water Security and Scarcity
Anthropological thinking on water security and scarcity can be traced through four scholarly approaches: political ecology of water scarcity, water insecurity, water economics, and human-water relationality. Political ecologists argue that water scarcity a sociopolitical process and not necessarily related to physical water availability. The political ecological approach is concerned with power, global-local dynamics, and how water scarcity is un…
Teaching Ethnographic Methods
Ethnography is a core methodology in anthropology and other disciplines. Yet, there is currently no scholarly consensus on how to teach ethnographic methods—or even what methods belong in the ethnographic toolkit. We report on a systematic analysis of syllabi to gauge how ethnographic methods are taught in the United States. We analyze 107 methods syllabi from a nationally elicited sample of university faculty who teach ethnography. Systematic co…
Can Informal Water Vendors Deliver on the Promise of A Human Right to Water? Results From Cochabamba, Bolivia
The economic anthropology of water
Anthropological research on water and economy has a long and rich history, especially among archaeologists and political economy scholars. In this review article, we discuss contemporary anthropological scholarship on water and economy to identify still-active areas of long-standing theoretical interest as well as novel theoretical approaches. We present five important threads of scholarship on the economic anthropology of water: (1) commodificat…
Water sharing is a distressing form of reciprocity
Anthropological theories of reciprocity suggest it enhances prestige, social solidarity, and material security. Yet, some ethnographic cases suggest that water sharing-a form of reciprocity newly gaining scholarly attention-might work in the opposite way, increasing conflict and emotional distress. Using cross-cultural survey data from twenty global sites (n = 4,267), we test how household water reciprocity (giving and receiving) is associated wi…
Blogs as Elusive Ethnographic Texts
Burgeoning online environments offer completely new opportunities for ethnographic and other forms of qualitative research. Yet there are no clear standards for how we study online texts from an ethnographic perspective. In this article, we identify barriers to the application of traditional qualitative methods online, using the example of a systematic thematic analysis of weight-loss blogs. These barriers include the influence of the technology …
Metatheme Analysis
In recent years, there has been a florescence of cross-cultural research using ethnographic and qualitative data. This cutting-edge work confronts a range of significant methodological challenges, but has not yet addressed how thematic analysis can be modified for use in cross-cultural ethnography. Thematic analysis is widely used in qualitative and mixed-methods research, yet is not currently well-adapted to cross-cultural ethnographic designs. …
Entrepreneurship as legacy building
Twenty-five years after democratic transition, the political liberation of Black South Africans has yet to translate into socioeconomic transformation. As protesters highlight the nation's failed economic transformation, a group of residents in Khayelitsha-Cape Town's largest township-are attempting to bring about economic transformation by becoming entrepreneurs. While informal entrepreneurship has been a mainstay of South African townships for …
Rethinking entrepreneurship through distribution
Entrepreneurship is commonly understood as the identification, evaluation, and execution of a market-based opportunity to produce profits. But anthropological scholarship shows that capitalism, and market relations more broadly, cannot function without acts of distribution. Focusing on two different groups of entrepreneurs across the racialized socioeconomic divides of Cape Town, South Africa - White South African entrepreneurs in the city's cent…
Teaching Ethnographic Methods for Cultural Anthropology
Historically, ethnographic methods were learned by cultural anthropology students in individual research projects. This approach creates challenges for teaching in ways that respond to the next generation’s calls to decenter anthropology’s White, heteropatriarchal voices and engage in collaborative community-based research. Analyzing syllabi from 107 ethnographic methods training courses from the United States, we find the tradition of the “lone …
Coding Qualitative Data at Scale
We outline a process for using large coder teams (10 + coders) to code large-scale qualitative data sets. The process reflects experience recruiting and managing large teams of novice and trainee coders for 18 projects in the last decade, each engaging a coding team of 12 (minimum) to 54 (maximum) coders. We identify four unique challenges to large coder teams that are not presently discussed in the methodological literature: (1) recruiting and t…
A Conceptual Framework for Social, Behavioral, and Environmental Change through Stakeholder Engagement in Water Resource Management
Incorporating stakeholder engagement into environmental management may help in the pursuit of novel approaches for addressing complex water resource problems. However, evidence about how and under what circumstances stakeholder engagement enables desirable changes remains elusive. In this paper, we develop a conceptual framework for studying social and environmental changes possible through stakeholder engagement in water resource management, fro…
Community-based Participant-observation (CBPO)
Community-based participant-observation purposefully combines participant-observation and community-based participatory research. While participant-observation is the core method of ethnography and foundational to cultural anthropology, community-based participatory research initially emerged from health and related applied sciences to align researchers' and communities' agendas through focused collaboration. Participant-observation and community…
Ethnographic methods
American anthropology is engaged in significant self-reckonings that call for big changes to how anthropology is practiced. These include (1) recognizing and taking seriously the demands to decolonize the ways research is done, (2) addressing precarious employment in academic anthropology, and (3) creating a discipline better positioned to respond to urgent societal needs. A central role for ethnographic methods training is a thread that runs thr…
Participatory Modeling
Participatory modeling (PM) is an engaged research methodology for creating analog or computer-based models of complex systems, such as socio-environmental systems. Used across a range of fields, PM centers stakeholder knowledge and participation to create more internally valid models that can inform policy and increase engagement and trust between communities and research teams. The PM process also presents opportunities for knowledge co-product…
Identifying Stakeholder Groups in Natural Resource Management
This study compares the efficiency of two analytic approaches—qualitative and quantitative—to social network analysis for identifying stakeholder groups. Social network data were collected from 23 water and agriculture stakeholders in Arizona, USA, and analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. Analysis of the sample in the original order of data collection found qualitative analysis was more efficient, in that it yielded a stable result—the iden…
Ayni Real and Imagined
Durante la última década hubo un cambio muy grande en las políticas bolivianas, demarcado por el rechazo a los gobiernos neoliberales y un incremento del activismo indígena. Ayni ("reciprocidad," quechua) representa nuevas posibilidades para un naciente orden económico. Exploramos el papel que las ONGs tienen en la promoción del ayni como una forma alternativa de desarrollo. Extrayendo de un análisis histórico de ayni, examinamos encuentros y des…
Water Sharing as Disaster Response
In 2017, Hurricane María left more than a third of Puerto Rican households without water services. Cascading failures—including the simultaneous collapse of water, electricity, and transportation sectors—presented serious challenges to the timely restoration of governmental services. In response, families across Puerto Rico adopted self-organized coping strategies to obtain the basic resources they needed, including safe and sufficient water. Dra…
Third-Party Effects in Stakeholder Interviews
This paper examines the effect of having a third-party scientific expert present in stakeholder interviews. The study was conducted as part of a larger project on stakeholder engagement for natural resource management in the Verde Valley region of Arizona. We employed an experimental design, conducting stakeholder interviews both with and without an identified scientific expert present. Our sample consisted of 12 pairs of interviewees (24 total p…
Children's Perceived Water Futures in the United States Southwest
This study examines children's perceptions of water via 3,120 pieces of artwork collected from 1,560 schoolchildren (age 9-11) in Arizona, United States, with a specific focus on how these are gendered. Each child produced two pieces of art, one depicting water in their community today and one 100 years in the future. Using content analysis, the study finds that (1) students' depictions of the future contain statistically significantly more pollu…
Leadership networks in Catholic parishes
Can Informal Water Vendors Deliver on the Promise of A Human Right to Water? Results From Cochabamba, Bolivia
Blogs as Elusive Ethnographic Texts
Burgeoning online environments offer completely new opportunities for ethnographic and other forms of qualitative research. Yet there are no clear standards for how we study online texts from an ethnographic perspective. In this article, we identify barriers to the application of traditional qualitative methods online, using the example of a systematic thematic analysis of weight-loss blogs. These barriers include the influence of the technology …
Ayni Real and Imagined
Durante la última década hubo un cambio muy grande en las políticas bolivianas, demarcado por el rechazo a los gobiernos neoliberales y un incremento del activismo indígena. Ayni ("reciprocidad," quechua) representa nuevas posibilidades para un naciente orden económico. Exploramos el papel que las ONGs tienen en la promoción del ayni como una forma alternativa de desarrollo. Extrayendo de un análisis histórico de ayni, examinamos encuentros y des…
Does ecosystem services valuation reflect local cultural valuations? Comparative analysis of resident perspectives in four major urban river ecosystems
Anthropologists have long considered how people create and perceive the value of goods and services. While valuation of nature as a commodity is one means of conservation, locally resonant values of nature may not follow market logic. We apply the ecosystem services valuation (ESV) framework to four major urban river ecosystems (Australia, New Zealand, United States, and United Kingdom) to compare and contrast value (the alienable goods that are …
Economic Anthropology
economics, ecology, geography, and history.In 2017, Economic Anthropology doubled its annual publication list from one to two: a theme-based
The economic anthropology of water
Anthropological research on water and economy has a long and rich history, especially among archaeologists and political economy scholars. In this review article, we discuss contemporary anthropological scholarship on water and economy to identify still-active areas of long-standing theoretical interest as well as novel theoretical approaches. We present five important threads of scholarship on the economic anthropology of water: (1) commodificat…
Community and Autonomy
Over the past half-century, as neoliberal governance agendas dismantle state-sponsored safety nets and emphasize individual economic responsibility, entrepreneurship has become a ubiquitous form of work. Ethnographic research shows that individuals who pursue entrepreneurship are often motivated by a neoliberal ethos of self-reliance, higher earnings, and greater autonomy. Recent research, however, has shown that motivations vary for entrepreneur…
Identifying Stakeholder Groups in Natural Resource Management
This study compares the efficiency of two analytic approaches—qualitative and quantitative—to social network analysis for identifying stakeholder groups. Social network data were collected from 23 water and agriculture stakeholders in Arizona, USA, and analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. Analysis of the sample in the original order of data collection found qualitative analysis was more efficient, in that it yielded a stable result—the iden…
Third-Party Effects in Stakeholder Interviews
This paper examines the effect of having a third-party scientific expert present in stakeholder interviews. The study was conducted as part of a larger project on stakeholder engagement for natural resource management in the Verde Valley region of Arizona. We employed an experimental design, conducting stakeholder interviews both with and without an identified scientific expert present. Our sample consisted of 12 pairs of interviewees (24 total p…
Entrepreneurship as legacy building
Twenty-five years after democratic transition, the political liberation of Black South Africans has yet to translate into socioeconomic transformation. As protesters highlight the nation's failed economic transformation, a group of residents in Khayelitsha-Cape Town's largest township-are attempting to bring about economic transformation by becoming entrepreneurs. While informal entrepreneurship has been a mainstay of South African townships for …
A Conceptual Framework for Social, Behavioral, and Environmental Change through Stakeholder Engagement in Water Resource Management
Incorporating stakeholder engagement into environmental management may help in the pursuit of novel approaches for addressing complex water resource problems. However, evidence about how and under what circumstances stakeholder engagement enables desirable changes remains elusive. In this paper, we develop a conceptual framework for studying social and environmental changes possible through stakeholder engagement in water resource management, fro…
Metatheme Analysis
In recent years, there has been a florescence of cross-cultural research using ethnographic and qualitative data. This cutting-edge work confronts a range of significant methodological challenges, but has not yet addressed how thematic analysis can be modified for use in cross-cultural ethnography. Thematic analysis is widely used in qualitative and mixed-methods research, yet is not currently well-adapted to cross-cultural ethnographic designs. …
Rethinking entrepreneurship through distribution
Entrepreneurship is commonly understood as the identification, evaluation, and execution of a market-based opportunity to produce profits. But anthropological scholarship shows that capitalism, and market relations more broadly, cannot function without acts of distribution. Focusing on two different groups of entrepreneurs across the racialized socioeconomic divides of Cape Town, South Africa - White South African entrepreneurs in the city's cent…
Water Security and Scarcity
Anthropological thinking on water security and scarcity can be traced through four scholarly approaches: political ecology of water scarcity, water insecurity, water economics, and human-water relationality. Political ecologists argue that water scarcity a sociopolitical process and not necessarily related to physical water availability. The political ecological approach is concerned with power, global-local dynamics, and how water scarcity is un…
Teaching Ethnographic Methods
Ethnography is a core methodology in anthropology and other disciplines. Yet, there is currently no scholarly consensus on how to teach ethnographic methods—or even what methods belong in the ethnographic toolkit. We report on a systematic analysis of syllabi to gauge how ethnographic methods are taught in the United States. We analyze 107 methods syllabi from a nationally elicited sample of university faculty who teach ethnography. Systematic co…
Teaching Ethnographic Methods for Cultural Anthropology
Historically, ethnographic methods were learned by cultural anthropology students in individual research projects. This approach creates challenges for teaching in ways that respond to the next generation’s calls to decenter anthropology’s White, heteropatriarchal voices and engage in collaborative community-based research. Analyzing syllabi from 107 ethnographic methods training courses from the United States, we find the tradition of the “lone …
Coding Qualitative Data at Scale
We outline a process for using large coder teams (10 + coders) to code large-scale qualitative data sets. The process reflects experience recruiting and managing large teams of novice and trainee coders for 18 projects in the last decade, each engaging a coding team of 12 (minimum) to 54 (maximum) coders. We identify four unique challenges to large coder teams that are not presently discussed in the methodological literature: (1) recruiting and t…
Water sharing is a distressing form of reciprocity
Anthropological theories of reciprocity suggest it enhances prestige, social solidarity, and material security. Yet, some ethnographic cases suggest that water sharing-a form of reciprocity newly gaining scholarly attention-might work in the opposite way, increasing conflict and emotional distress. Using cross-cultural survey data from twenty global sites (n = 4,267), we test how household water reciprocity (giving and receiving) is associated wi…
A systems perspective on water markets
Garrick, Dustin; Balasubramanya, Soumya; Beresford, Melissa; Wutich, Amber; Gilson, Gina G; Jorgensen, Isabel; Brozovic, Nicholas; Cox, Michael; Dai, Xiaoping; Erfurth, Sophie; Rimšaitė, Renata; Svensson, Jesper; Jones, Julia Talbot; Unnikrishnan, Hita; Wight, Charles; Villamayor Tomás, Sergio; Mendoza, Karla Vazquez
Research supervisors and undergraduate students’ perceived gains from undergraduate research experiences in the social sciences
Undergraduate research experiences (UREs) enhance student retention, provide transferrable skills, and prepare students for advanced graduate study. The majority of these benefits, however, are concentrated within the natural and biological sciences; disciplines with historical under-representation of non-male students. If offered in the social sciences, UREs would be more accessible to women, students of colour, and first-generation students. Bu…
Ethnographic Methods Training Norms and Practices and the Future of American Anthropology
American Anthropology is engaged in significant self-reckonings that call for big changes to how anthropology is practiced. These include (1) recognizing and taking seriously the demands to decolonize the ways research is done; (2) addressing precarious employment in academic anthropology; and (3) creating a discipline better positioned to respond to urgent societal needs. A central role for ethnographic methods training is a thread that runs thr…
Water Sharing as Disaster Response
In 2017, Hurricane María left more than a third of Puerto Rican households without water services. Cascading failures—including the simultaneous collapse of water, electricity, and transportation sectors—presented serious challenges to the timely restoration of governmental services. In response, families across Puerto Rico adopted self-organized coping strategies to obtain the basic resources they needed, including safe and sufficient water. Dra…
Participatory Modeling
Participatory modeling (PM) is an engaged research methodology for creating analog or computer-based models of complex systems, such as socio-environmental systems. Used across a range of fields, PM centers stakeholder knowledge and participation to create more internally valid models that can inform policy and increase engagement and trust between communities and research teams. The PM process also presents opportunities for knowledge co-product…
Sociology (30 obras) · Political science (18 obras) · Computer Science (15 obras) · Social science (15 obras) · Psychology (12 obras) · Anthropology (11 obras) · Ethnography (11 obras) · Business (10 obras) · Economics (10 obras) · Qualitative research (10 obras)