Doctoral Dissertation Research: Flood Infrastructure and Heritage Preservation in the South Carolina Lowcountry

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Annual flooding in Charleston, South Carolina, and the surrounding Lowcountry has increased 50% and the region has suffered a major hurricane every year for the past 4 years. Although the low-lying region has a long history of flooding, this rapid increase has sparked a crisis discourse, leading the city government to name flooding "the #1 priority" and begin swift actions to preserve the local environs. This project, which trains a doctoral student in methods of rigorous and empirically-grounded data collection and analysis, examines the creation and maintenance of Charleston's storm drainage systems, seawalls, and networks of rice dikes and floodgates to map and analyze the preservation of heritage sites. Project findings will be disseminated in such a way that aids planners explore more equitable ways to define risk, resistance, and resilience in regards to specific community needs and desires. Finally, this research project aims to produce work that will be helpful to local communities fighting the impacts of flooding in Charleston, South Carolina. Brian Walter, under the supervision of Dr. Melissa Caldwell of the University of California at Santa Cruz will investigate the relationship between flood water and heritage discourses and practices by conducting ethnographic fieldwork in the Charleston Lowcountry. During this period, he will work across stratified locations suffering the effects of sea-level-rise. At these sites, the researcher will use interviews, participant observation, and participatory GIS to gain knowledge about how individuals differentially define heritage in the environment, experience sea-level rise and fight for the maintenance of flood infrastructure. This work aims to contribute to debates about environmental change mitigation, by offering an ethnographic case to better explain how sea-level-rise is experienced socioeconomically: an essential complement to quantitative data models that focus on macro-level change and assume an equal amount of flooding causes equal damage to life. This outcome will help make the intersection between race and the environment visible in policy conversations and help promote methodologies to determine alternative definitions of normed policy concepts such as value, vulnerability, or heritage site employed in current spatial studies determining the impacts of sea-level rise.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.