When I first heard about the Grand Challenges, I was excited to see change, but it seemed like a process that only experienced professors and experts could be a part of. When I was invited to be a part of it as a student of Community and Regional Planning, I was incredibly honored and surprised, but I had no idea how much this project would involve and touch me.
This project was an extension to the interdisciplinary methods I had cultivated throughout my undergraduate years, but it also opened the door to a more realistic view of what it could look like in the academic realm. We were all experienced in our own areas, ranging from geography engineering, film, and community and regional planning, yet somehow the interest of wanting to share knowledge about water in New Mexico allowed us to come together and work on this exciting task.
There were moments where I felt that I had to really stretch my imagination and delve into spaces far beyond my comfort zone. I heard members of the team say similar things; it seemed that we were all a little hesitant not only to step on each other’s toes but also to be wrong. It soon became clear however, that it was sometimes the small inquiries we had about other’s fields that created discussion points that would eventually lead to real enlightenment and growth in the project. I think we are often taught to “leave things to the experts” but through this project I saw that it is actually the involvement of people who approach a topic with curiosity and confusion that will lend an important hand in the development of new solutions. It is the cooperation between the two that creates new perspectives and opens the door to a more realistic view of how our intended audiences might approach the topic. I saw all of us grow more confident in throwing out ideas and doubts as time went on, and it allowed the project to be a lot more successful than I think anybody could’ve anticipated.
I remember the team being stumped with what direction to take once the pandemic hit. We were all still very excited and invested in the project, but it seemed like the focus of the world was on this life changing event and water had taken a backseat among all of the uncertainty. I remember sitting in front of my computer on yet another zoom call when it occurred to me that water was still incredibly important, and especially now that people felt so skeptical about the world; our educational approach could help qualm those fears and still stay true to our hopes of creating an interactive and engaging platform with which to disseminate information. I suggested that we switch the project to consider the implications of water as we now entered this new world view; with people hoarding water bottles, we could tie it back to our early questions about consumption, taste, and quality of water bottles as well as the nuance it carries. We could also catalog and interpret the reactions of people to their water supplies in real-time. It felt like an incredible opportunity, even if it had to be among so much tragedy.
I think many people regard research as a very cold, scientific process that is not concerned with the human experience. But it was exactly this project and this group of people that I teamed up with that allowed me to prove through praxis that research can in fact be a creative process that is imbued with many human qualities, and that it exists to better interpret the world and allow people of all backgrounds access to information and more importantly, to choice. With this, we shifted the template of the project by moving away from videos and into the realm of podcasts. This allowed all of us to explore a whole new area that we weren’t as familiar with, and for me personally it felt like a great marriage of my abilities as a professional and my interests as an individual. It did, however, require me (and many members of the team) to once again have to think beyond our abilities. We had to now transfer all the research we had done into an entirely audio format, in a way that was still creative and, in a way, a translation of all of the visual work that we had planned to integrate into the videos. This was a bit mind boggling at first because I am definitely an audio-visual learner and cutting out the visuals was hard for me to fathom at first. Luckily, I was able to count on the rest of the team to boost each other and I became much more comfortable exploring creative ways to incorporate emotion into audio and connect with people through ideas I pulled from other podcasts I listened to (I confess some of them were D&D related) and music from local artists, as well as thinking how to incorporate unusual everyday sounds of water into our narrative.
It is my goal to pursue a career in food systems, integrating sustainability with agriculture in ways that will push our societies forward and allow our communities to reclaim sovereignty over one of the most basic and shared human experiences. Although my academic career has pushed me to learn important skills and collaborate with others in many environments, working on this project was a unique experience and I think it has prepared in ways that would not have been possible otherwise. Although it has been an overwhelming experience for people worldwide to be in a pandemic, I think it has also provided a nudge for all of us to do our part in contributing to the safeguarding of the future.
In the end, this experience taught me much more than just what I learned from researching water, it gave me the tools to share my knowledge with others and to be humbled by their own intelligence as we worked together; sharing a common goal with such different people gave me a purpose and something to look forward to during a very difficult time for me, especially as we all navigated through the pandemic. It also solidified for me once again, how valuable interdisciplinary work is, and I hope that UNM continues to provide spaces where it can be practiced.
Author: Melissa Madrigal, UNM Department of Community and Regional Planning graduate