Watermarks

Anthropologists on who ends up without clean water, and why

Watermarks is a documentary mini-series about water inequality around the world. Each episode is built around one leading anthropologist and the work of their career: what they went looking for, what they found, and the patterns that keep repeating across very different places.

Episode 1 — Dr. Sera Young

Northwestern University

Dr. Sera Young studies water insecurity and global health. While working with mothers in western Kenya, she found that the thing shaping their lives most had no way of being measured. So she built one: the WISE Scales, the first tool that measures water insecurity the same way in every country on earth.

In this episode she talks about the stories that started her work, the twelve questions that became the scale, the letter she wrote to the UN, and what the data shows about who ends up without clean water. She also talks about the tap, and why the fact that it works is a kind of miracle most people never notice.

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Coming Soon

Dr. Cassandra Workman
University of North Carolina Greensboro

In Lesotho, water shortage tangled with hunger, HIV, and illness, each making the others worse. In North Carolina, water lines became a tool of segregation. Either way, water is carrying something else.

Coming soon

Dr. Joshua Miller
University at Buffalo

Across 141 countries, more than half of adults expect their drinking water to harm them, even where it's objectively safe. The strongest predictor wasn't water quality. It was distrust of government.

Coming soon

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