Thanks for your comment. We have definitely grown to work together over the past 7 years, and have mutual respect for each other. Initially our students took courses in each other's departments. Now, we are co-developing and co-teaching courses and the co-creation of knowledge continues. One thing that emerged from the grant that supported the work in the above video, is a National Research Traineeship that uses a systems thinking lens to approach Food Energy Water Systems with coastal communities. It was really watching how our group worked together in Placencia, Belize and wanting to build on that in a much more formal way. The Grand Challenges of Environmental Engineering were released in December 2018 by NASEM (sponsored by NSF) and the ultimate grand challenge calls for alot more of this type of integrated and community engaged work. Our Strong Coasts cohort is now starting and we will update on how it's going. Here's the link http://www.strongcoasts.org/. 

Good questions-- communication is always the hard part! We were very fortunate in the beginning to have a week-long NSF residential seminar at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, NM. You can read about the collaboration and resulting products here: https://sarweb.org/seminars/research-2016/global-water-energy-nexus/. This was followed by a second week-long "research incubation" meeting at the Institute of Advanced Study at Durham University in the UK: https://www.dur.ac.uk/ias/.

What really helped with collaboration and communication was having anthropology and engineering students live together in the field (Belize) while working on the project. The informal conversations that emerged really got the students using each other's language and understanding each other's worldview. By the end of the research, we had anthropology students talking about the sanitation value chain and engineering students quoting Foucault!

Thank you for your question! The short answer is yes... we work closely with local politicians (in Belize, it's the "Village Council"). In fact, we can't/won't work with the community without the permission and active collaboration of community leaders. But working with local policies before/during/after the research can be complicated. Sometimes it's a bit of a minefield. But being open and honest about why you're there and what you're doing goes a long way to building trust, which is ultimately one of the most important aspects of working with communities in the Global South. All too often, academics from the U.S. "show up" in communities in Latin America, for example, and engage in "drive by" research, where the engagement lasts a couple of weeks at most. To build lasting and sustainable change, you really need to be there for a much longer period, and to come back again and again-- it's about demonstrating long-term commitment instead of just "visiting" to try to force quick change.

Thanks, Lucía, I couldn't agree more! I see this a lot in Mexico and Central America, not only with development projects (especially NGOs), but also university-based programs. There is a great article on this and "third sector science" that I recommend: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44148687?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents

That's great resource. Thanks, Christian.

Thanks so much for your kind words, comments, and questions, Jay! I will try my best to address them all:

1. We have a wonderful assessment being conducted by Dr. Allan Feldman from USF of changes in student perceptions and behaviors before, during, and after our NSF PIRE collaboration. I look forward to seeing his final report.

2. Regarding the future of graduate education, I have come to an unexpected opinion having worked with this team for 7 years now. Before this project, I really thought that transdisciplinary approaches to graduate education was the future. But now, I realize that being a specialist in your field also has fundamental value, and that maybe for some kinds of research, we don't need/want students trained very broadly to the point that they are not specialists in their field. I now see a great deal of value in bringing expertise together (that's why I named our video, "Diversity Improves Design"). I think the biggest challenge is developing frameworks for working together. Doing so allows the property of complementarity to develop and mature. Holism and systems thinking are still critically important, don't get me wrong, but not if we end up with 'jacks of all trades, masters of none.'

3. The question of what happens next is what we are dealing with now... It's an exciting time and a terrifying one, too! But thanks to the friendships that we developed on our team, our partnership and collaboration endures. Since our PIRE project, we have had two significant spin-offs-- two successful NSF projects that are outcomes of our initial collaboration: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1638301 and https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1735320&HistoricalAwards=false. Onward and upward!

Jay and Christian, adding some thoughts here. NASEM recently releases the Grand Challenges for Environmental Engineering for the 21st Century and I just returned from the Association of Environmental Engineering and Science Professors conference where this was discussed quite a bit. It was emphasized that we need systemic change to ensure community engaged work that demonstrates community impact (positive) needs to be considered in T&P and that our field needs to better prepare to perform such work and to evaluate it. Those who are doing it already need to share their approaches etc. as the field learns to do more of it. This to me is one way of mainstreaming approaches like those discussed in the video so that they are not dependent on the few professors who do it right now - mind you I also don’t see anything wrong with being more supportive of first adopters. Our cohorts are now taking faculty positions and it will be really interesting to see how they expand on the training they have gotten through our program. Many of the environmental engineers were at that conference last week and I feel optimistic as they are also looking for ways to collaborate amongst themselves now. 

The NRT grant I think is a good example of something that evolved from the PIRE. It adds new interdisciplinary courses, including a field course overseas in Belize. It emphasizes systems thinking and community engagement throughout. The first cohort started in January, so evaluation data on this is unavailable. The approach to this new grant was very much built on the experience of some of our students in Belize during the PIRE and builds on the relationships developed then. Back to our new NASEM report, I think our cohort will more align with the role of integrator and systems thinking and the ability to bring disparate voices together will be tools that they use to accomplish this. 

This is terrific, thank you!

Hi Ivory. Howard graduates the most African American undergrads in engineering accounting to the latest NSF report on our demographics. USF is also listed as one of the top places for graduating African American students. One of the outcomes of the PIRE was the establishment of a 3+2 program with the University of the Virgin Islands, also an HBCU. We continue to build on that relationship and they are also collaborators on a new National Research Traineeship grants branded now as Strong Coasts - http://www.strongcoasts.org 

hi Judith, thanks for your comments and question-- my answer to which is a resounding yes! By integrating social science with engineering, we were able to include a diversity of voices, including local stakeholder groups, into the design process for WaSH problems. Anthropology, with its attention to holism (e.g., framing problems and solutions along the axes culture, power, and history) helped situate what the engineers were doing in cultural and geographic context. At the same time, the engineers taught the anthropologists about the possibilities and limitations of technological solutions. Our main research question for our grant is: "can effective, geographically-appropriate, and culturally relevant engineered systems be established that utilize wastewater as a resource for recovery of energy, water, and nutrients?"

Thanks, Ivory! As applied anthropologists, we work explicitly with communities who identify their own problems and challenges (we don't presume to know what problems people have). So to do this, we identify key stakeholders in the community and begin having conversations with them, always with our last question being, who else can we talk with about this. This allows us to follow people's social networks and identify broader and sometimes cross-cutting stakeholder groups. It has also been important for us to then include these community partners in every step of the project, from problem identification to solution design and implementation and followup. These are ultimately long-term relationships and commitments.

Ultimately, we recognize that communities are not simple geographical constructs, but have multiple sociospatial and sociopolitical meanings to their residents, and that these meanings can shift, sometimes significantly, depending on the stakeholder groups involved. Water and sanitation systems and watershed and ecosystem management can thus cross multiple communities and be subject to larger institutional arrangements at multiple scales as well as imbalances in the distribution of resources. So it’s vital to take a holistic and multivocal approach.

We outline this approach here: https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/ees.2015.0334

Thank you, Terri!