Collaborative Accelerator Award Highlight: Dr. Paula Skye Tallman, Dr. Armando Valdes-Velasquez, & Dr. Natalia Piland

Paula Skye Tallman, Armando Valdes-Velasquez, and Natalia Piland, 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 “Amazonian Waterscapes: Extractive Industries, Water Insecurity, and Indigenous Health and Wellbeing” group through the Collaborator Accelerator Award (CAA), by funding their project retreats to work collaboratively for a writing workshop on their collaborative paper.

The CAA supported a three-day, intensive writing workshop for the paper, “Amazonian Waterscapes: Extractive Industries, Water Insecurity, and Indigenous Health and Wellbeing” that was hosted in October 2022. Working with Loyola undergraduate, Melanie Villarmarzo, the team created a visual model showing how indigenous Amazonian communities are connected to local freshwater systems, using the socio-ecological model as a guide (Bronfenbrenner, 1979). This model of the “Amazonian human-water system” was presented by Tallman at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting in November 2022. The manuscript, which focuses on how extractive industries produce water insecurity by disrupting the “Amazonian human-water system” is in progress and will be submitted to the journal Ecohealth this spring. “The main brainstorming, which allowed us to outline the paper and create our central model, was made possible by HWISE.”

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