Melissa Beresford
Associate Professor
Ph.D. Arizona State University, 2018
Expertise:
Ecological & economic anthropology; water insecurity; resource distribution; social
norms; institutional economics; field methods; qualitative data analysis; cross-cultural
research
Office Hours: Will resume Spring 2025
Clark Hall 402G
408-924-4778
melissa.beresford@sjsu.edu Melissa Beresford's CV [pdf]
Melissa Beresford is an anthropologist and a research methodologist. She investigates
how cultural norms shape the ways people distribute and exchange fresh water 鈥� especially
in the context of the global water crisis and accelerating climate change.
Funded by an NSF CAREER grant, she leads an international group of scholars researching
how 鈥渕oral economies鈥� (a specific type of norm-based social system) allow people to
adapt to water insecurity across different global contexts. This work is part of a
new field of scholarship that brings together social scientists, engineers, data scientists,
and legal scholars to theorize the evolution of new social and technological infrastructures
that will arise in response to the collapse of centralized water systems and the emergence
of "MAD Water" systems (Modular, Adaptive, Decentralized infrastructures), triggered
by climate change and shifting patterns in migration and urbanization.
An ethnographer by training, Beresford grounds her research agenda in community-based,
mixed-methods field research with water-insecure communities in California and the
broader U.S. West. She leads and participates in international collaborations that
bring local ethnographic fieldwork findings from multiple global sites into cross-cultural
comparison. This interdisciplinary cross-cultural research approach enables Beresford
and her collaborators to build generalizable knowledge that can help drive forward
new public policy agendas, including those for water management and advancing the
Human Right to Water.
Beresford Co-Directs the NSF Cultural Anthropology Methods Program (CAMP), which advances
research methods scholarship and training in anthropology. She is a Steering Committee
Member of the NSF-funded Household Water Insecurity (HWISE) Research Coordination
Network, a global network of water insecurity scholars. She is the Editor of the Cultural
Anthropology Desk for Economic Anthropology and Associate Editor of Field Methods.
As an experienced and enthusiastic teacher, Beresford鈥檚 primary teaching foci include
research methods training; mentorship techniques for diverse student bodies; pedagogy
and practice of diverse teaching modalities (including hybrid and online formats);
experiential learning (undergraduate research experiences, study abroad); and citizen
science projects. She has directed fieldwork teams of undergraduate and graduate students
in California, Arizona, South Africa, and Latin America, and she directs the Culture,
Economy, and Environment (CEE) training laboratory at San Jose State University, focused
on training undergraduate students in social science research methods and team science.
