Anthropology and global health Prof. Sera Young has spent her career tackling food and water crises in under-resourced communities.

After graduating from the University of Michigan, Young spent about six months in Zanzibar, Tanzania, as a Rotary Cultural Ambassador Scholar living with a Swahili speaking family to learn the language. She returned to Tanzania for another six months as a Ph.D. student through Cornell University. During that time, she researched cultural understandings on maternal anemia, food insecurity and issues related to water use and access.

Young played a key role in developing Water Insecurity Experiences scales, such as the Household Water Insecurity Experiences and Individual Water Insecurity Experiences scales to quantify the “prevalence, causes and consequences” of water access in communities and cultures across the globe.

The Daily spoke with Young to learn more about her goals to teach students about the importance of water in everyday life and engage students with water research. 

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

The Daily: How do you approach understanding complex issues like water or food insecurity from both an anthropological and global health perspective?

Prof. Sera Young: There’s really great techniques that both global health and anthropologists have used to understand the world.

I think (anthropologists’) special trick is that they can make the strange seem really familiar, and then they can also make the familiar seem just really strange. They observe and talk to people and interview people. And then a lot of anthropologists, especially biological anthropologists, test those hypotheses that they generate from talking with people with quantitative data, and that’s often survey data.

The Daily: Talk about your work with water insecurity.

Young: During field work in Kenya and Tanzania, people told me that food was an issue, but so was water. A good scientist is willing to listen to what people say and not just do, and so I changed the course of my whole career by listening to what women were telling me in the field.

I started out by doing interviews with people, and we did this really cool thing called photo elicitation interviews where we gave people cameras and asked them to take pictures of things that shaped how they fed their infants. Then they would come back, and we would look at the photos together. What became clear was that there are big issues with water.

The Daily: You teach with the Northwestern Prison Education program. What was your experience with the program? 

Young: I learned so much from that teaching. It’s just a different perspective on life … What I didn’t appreciate when I started teaching it is (the) huge problems with water at the prison itself. Some of my students talked about how this class gave them the vocabulary for talking about water insecurity. They talk about problems with water or water issues, but (became) empowered to articulate some of the issues that were happening with water in the prison, and it made me think about measurement of water issues in institutional settings.

Both teaching in Northwestern Prison Education and also teaching Evanston students, is getting them to see water in a different way. I mean, it’s so easy to take it for granted. Through some of the assignments you can really see the penny drop, and suddenly they’re all in, writing raps or poems or drip paintings about water.

The class spans from the molecular and cellular level of water up to physiology, to how it shapes household relationships, to how it shapes communities. We can take water within a cell, out to the level of the UN. 

The Daily: Why is research and education on water so important?

Young: When is the last time you didn’t drink water? Sitting here right now, your body is 65% (50% to 70% water). It is literally life. We can say oil is important, oil is replaceable. There’s solar, there’s wind, there’s ‘like water,’ there’s no alternative water.

What I want to be doing is making water a more active part of NU, and to that end, we have this Student Water Jamboree. We’re going to talk with students who are interested in water in any sort of way. We’re calling it a student water jamboree, where we’re going to be at the Sailing Center doing stand up paddle boards and stuff like that.

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