CAREER: Energy Transition on Rural America: Studying Cultural, Technological, and Economic Change

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Rural communities have long been the nation's cornerstone for energy production. But many of these communities are undergoing immense change, led by market forces, environmental changes, and the improvement of solar and wind technology. This project contributes new knowledge by examining the rapidly changing relationship between rural areas and energy. These changes are felt in sharpest relief in the Rocky Mountain West, in places that have depended heavily on fossil-fuel energy production. How are rural communities affected by large-scale economic, technological, and cultural shifts away from fossil-fuels toward renewable energy? What do these changes mean for the loss of rural culture and community, and how can these areas best adapt? The findings will expand our understanding of rural, low capital, and underserved areas, especially in the Western U.S., to inform policy in a rapidly changing cultural, political, technological, and economic environment. The project advances scientific knowledge in three ways, First, it develops, implements, and disseminates an innovative mixed-methods approach that blends computational social science with long-term ethnographic fieldwork in rural communities. This approach is especially suited to the research questions above, and will help other social scientists to blend large-scale data science with on-the-ground fieldwork. Second, it advances rural and environmental research beyond its historical foci (e.g., on the Rust Belt and Appalachia), to account for different dynamics in the under-researched Western U.S. Third, it takes up the call from leading scholars for deeper and more empirically grounded study of rural relationships to energy. In doing so, this study constructs a new theoretical framework that synthesizes research from sociology, energy studies, science and technology studies, religion, economics, and law.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.