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]
Google Scholar Page

Melissa Beresford is an anthropologist and a research methodologist. She investigates how cultural norms shape the ways people distribute and exchange fresh water – 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 “moral economies” (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’s 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.