Faculty of Education Colloquium Series -FR

Event Details:

Faculty of Education Colloquium Series - To Drink or Not to Drink? Exploring drinking water practices using Cellphiming with Dr Jennifer Thompson, Summer Scholar.

Bottled water bans aim to curb the use of single-use plastics, and ‘take back the tap’ in response to social and environmental justice concerns. Yet emerging campus-based research questions the efficacy of these bans, for example, with unintended consequences such as increased sales of sugary juices and sodas (Berman & Johnson, 2015). Very little qualitative research explores the social and cultural aspects of drinking water more generally. In this talk, I will present a pilot study about drinking water that I have been working on with students at Durham University in the UK. I will discuss how we worked with a participatory visual research framework to produce short cellphilms (videos shot on mobile phones) about drinking water as a social practice, and our transition to co-writing together about the study. Our findings challenge and nuance the idea that negative perceptions of tap water alone influence how people drink water. The study has implications for research and interventions aimed at promoting social and environmental change around everyday practices such as drinking water.

Jennifer Thompson is a Visiting SSHRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at Durham University in the UK. Her research interests include participatory visual methodologies, research ethics, gender and water. Jen has a background across engineering, education and international development.

Building: Marshall d'Avray Hall

Room Number: 356