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

南卡罗来纳查尔斯顿及周边低地地区的年度洪水增加了50%，在过去4年里，该地区每年都遭受一场大飓风的袭击。尽管这一低洼地区的洪水由来已久，但洪水的迅速增加引发了一场危机讨论，导致市政府将洪水列为“第一要务”，并开始迅速采取行动保护当地环境。该项目将培养一名博士生，学习严谨的、基于经验的数据收集和分析方法，研究查尔斯顿雨水排水系统、海堤、大米堤防和闸门网络的创建和维护，以绘制和分析遗产遗址的保护。项目调查结果的传播方式将有助于规划人员根据社区的具体需求和愿望探索更公平的方式来界定风险、抵抗力和复原力。最后，这个研究项目的目标是产生有助于当地社区对抗南卡罗来纳州查尔斯顿洪水影响的工作。布莱恩·沃尔特在加州大学圣克鲁斯分校的梅丽莎·考德威尔博士的指导下，将通过在查尔斯顿低地进行民族志田野调查，调查洪水与遗产话语和实践之间的关系。在此期间，他将在遭受海平面上升影响的分层地点工作。在这些地点，研究人员将使用访谈、参与式观察和参与式地理信息系统来了解个体如何在环境中不同地定义遗产、经历海平面上升和为维护防洪基础设施而斗争。这项工作旨在通过提供一个人种学案例来更好地解释海平面上升是如何在社会经济上经历的，从而促进关于减缓环境变化的辩论：这是对定量数据模型的重要补充，该模型侧重于宏观层面的变化，并假设等量的洪水对生命造成等量的损害。这一结果将有助于使种族和环境之间的交集在政策对话中可见，并有助于促进确定规范政策概念的替代定义的方法，例如在当前确定海平面上升影响的空间研究中使用的价值、脆弱性或遗址。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。

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.