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

长期以来，农村社区一直是美国能源生产的基石。但是，在市场力量、环境变化以及太阳能和风能技术进步的推动下，这些社区中的许多正在经历巨大的变化。该项目通过研究农村地区与能源之间快速变化的关系，提供了新的知识。这些变化在严重依赖化石燃料能源生产的落基山脉西部地区表现得最为明显。从化石燃料向可再生能源的大规模经济、技术和文化转变对农村社区有何影响？这些变化对农村文化和社区的丧失意味着什么？这些地区如何才能最好地适应？这些发现将扩大我们对农村、低资本和服务不足地区的理解，特别是在美国西部，为快速变化的文化、政治、技术和经济环境中的政策提供信息。该项目以三种方式推进科学知识：首先，它开发、实施和传播一种创新的混合方法，将计算社会科学与农村社区的长期民族志实地调查相结合。这种方法特别适合上述研究问题，并将帮助其他社会科学家将大规模数据科学与实地调查相结合。其次，它将农村和环境研究推进到其历史焦点之外（例如，在铁锈地带和阿巴拉契亚），以解释研究不足的美国西部的不同动态。第三，它接受了领先学者对农村与能源关系的更深入和更有经验基础的研究的呼吁。在此基础上，本研究构建了一个综合社会学、能源学、科学技术、宗教、经济学和法学研究的新理论框架。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.