by Michelle Henderson

Our class discussion started with a brief discussion on property and ownership. In many of the places where our research is focused, there is a constant discussion of who owns the land and what the land is used for.  These conversations affect people in Placencia, Belize and U.S. Virgin Island St. Thomas and commonly include dialogue on beaches and other public and tourist areas. These discussions often evolve into conversations on environmental justice issues.

We were introduced to new ideas and terminology in systems thinking such as reductionism, interconnectedness, perspective and worldview. When doing systems modeling, the idea of reductionism can be helpful in designing a system boundary. Reductionism focuses on one component of a system as opposed to the interconnectedness of a system. Interconnectedness focuses on how the whole system interacts instead of the separated components.

One point of major discussion was the differences in perspective and worldview. Based on our learning module, perspective is how we view things from our current situation, and that perspective can change if our situation changes. A worldview is an ingrained belief that does not typically change with a changed situation or environment. This led to a further discussion on emic (perspective of the subject) and etic (perspective of the observer) points of view. In our research emic would be stakeholders and individuals in the community while an etic perspective would be institutional. But as a group we wondered how we find the balance between emic and etic. How can we engage the community with intentionality by building relationships and also retain a form of objectivity? We also started to garner our vocabulary on “what is a system” and how do we define causal relationships. As we move forward, we will implement these ideas into our systems models by not only using these terms in our speech, but also by incorporating the ideologies into our research.

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Michelle Henderson is an environmental scientist whose work focuses on water reuse at the decentralized level. Michelle’s work adds a small solution to the much larger problem of water disparities around in the United States and across the world. During her undergraduate degree, she was a National Institute of Health (NIH) Maximizing Access to Research Careers (MARC) program scholar. During her time at USF, Michelle obtained her Master’s degree in Engineering Science with a concentration in Environmental Engineering. While pursuing her PhD in Environmental Engineering at the University of South Florida (USF), Michelle has developed skills related with microbiology and systems thinking. During 2018, Michelle had the unique opportunity to conduct research abroad in Israel to quantify antibiotic resistant genes (ARG) in greywater systems.  Outside of her research Ms. Henderson is involved with various community organizations and NGO’s. She serves as the Environmental Programme Director for Impact Global International.