Kristin Dobbin and Jenny Rempel are recipients of the HWISE Collaborative Accelerator Award (CAA), a funding opportunity to bring small teams of researchers (2-3 members) together to accelerate new theoretical, methodological, analytical, outreach, and educational collaborations related to household water insecurity”. HWISE funded the “Symbolic, Tactical, and/or Transformative? Interrogating the Impact of California’s Human Right to Water Law Ten Years After Passage” group through the Collaborator Accelerator Award (CAA), by funding their project retreats to work collaboratively as well interview transcriptions.
“Our project leverages semi-structured interviews, archival research, and document analysis to understand how and why water justice advocates in organized to pass AB 685 – California’s human right to water law in 2012 and what has come from the historic effort in the ten years since. Our results highlight how, while not without limitations, supposedly “symbolic policies” like AB 685 can have significant and wide-reaching impacts, particularly in shaping issue and policy narratives and emboldening organizers. Findings from the project will be shared in a variety of different formats targeting different audiences from scholars to policymakers, to organizers. The first of these products is an op-ed which will be published in the coming weeks by the nonprofit newsroom CalMatters as we mark the 10-year anniversary January 1st.”
“The HWISE CAA provided us the funds we needed to get together in-person for project retreats that facilitated dedicated work time to advance our project collaboratively (attached photo is from a hike we took on our first retreat). Originally we had planned for the funds to also support our travel to conduct interviews, due to COVID concerns and logistics we moved all interviews onto zoom and ended up repurposing these funds to pay for interview transcription which supported a more detailed qualitative coding and analysis process than we had originally planned to pursue. The switch to zoom did have another benefit, rather than conducting 10-15 interviews as originally planned, we conducted 23!”