Interview: Russell Berman. Cultural Theory and Intellectual Politics

An Interview with Russell Berman, Department of German Studies, Stanford University

Challenges of researching showering routines: From the individual to the socio-material

In the UK, water supplies are under pressure from climate, population and lifestyle change. Showering is the largest component of domestic water consumption. Young adults are high water-users at a transitional life-stage, when practices are dynamic, and habits shaped. This paper presents the methodology, early findings and reflections on challenges of working with different data types and scales, to explore real-world water-saving through a mixed-methods approach, focusing on showering patterns of first year university students in campus accommodation at the University of the West of England, Bristol, UK. Combining household meter, logged water-fixture micro-component, personal-use questionnaire, user diary and stakeholder focus group data with the Scottish Government Individual-Social-Material model, typical showering demand reduction interventions were evaluated and insights into alternative interventions were generated. Results indicate Estates’ routine equipment maintenance and database management affect data quality and consistency. Despite these issues a profile of daily student water use was derived (equivalent to 114 L per person per day) but with high variability between different households (from 83 to 151 L per person per day). Average shower durations (self-reported 10–12 min) were higher than reported UK norms, although frequency was similar to the UK daily shower norm. Average measured shower volumes (51 L in one house) were not excessive, indicating shower fixtures provided a contribution to water saving

Developing and applying water security metrics in China: experience and challenges

© 2016 Elsevier B.V. In recent years the ‘water security’ concept has gained both increased public profile and also traction in policy-making circles in China. Moreover its strategic significance for the country has been more frequently addressed by central government. Indicators characterizing the major components of water security, such as socio-economic conditions, water resources, water environment, and aquatic ecosystems, have been used to develop composite metrics and measure China's progress towards water security at different spatial scales including national, provinces, cities, and river basins since the early 2000s. Aiming at providing sound decision-making, however, there are still critical methodological challenges to this now well-established practice — for example, the selection, banding and aggregation of indicators, and consideration of stakeholder participation

A review of 80 assessment tools measuring water security

© 2021 The Authors. WIREs Water published by Wiley Periodicals LLC. Scholars and practitioners have been working on methodologies to measure water security at a variety of scale and focus. In this paper, we critically examine the landscape of water security metrics, discussing the progress and gaps of this rich scholarship. We reviewed a total of 107 publications consisting of 17 conceptual papers and 90 methodological papers that propose 80 metrics to measure water security and observed that there are two dominant research clusters in this field: experiential scale-based metrics and resource-based metrics. The former mainly focus on measuring the water experiences of households and its impact on human well-being, while the majority of the latter assess freshwater availability or water resources security. We compare their approaches and the arguments used to develop them. We posit that the more local the scale and the more specific the water domain, the more meaningful results that the metrics can provide. Acknowledging the interrelationship between different water domains (e.g., water resources and water hazards) is important, but their aggregation for measurement may be problematic. We offer our views on future work in this field relating to topics beyond water, the need to conduct validation tests, and collaboration among academics and with other stakeholders. This article is categorized under: Human Water > Human Water