Collaborative Research: Sociotechnical Imaginaries, Infrastructure Publics, and Electricity

该奖项支持东北大学和波多黎各大学的社会科学学者之间的合作研究努力。该项目的目标是比较社会技术想象，即以创新技术项目的发展为中心的社会秩序的想象形式；在这种情况下，感兴趣的项目是波多黎各(美国的一个未合并领土)的电力系统。该项目将绘制出随着时间的推移，不同的想象是如何在岛上电力的物质和社会轮廓中编码的，它还将反映灾难性的事件--飓风玛丽亚--如何为不同的想象创造机会来传播。这项研究的结果将有助于关于波多黎各能源未来的重要的、不断发展的公众讨论。传播计划包括将边缘化的声音纳入主流政治对话，包括为政策简报作出贡献，以满足利益攸关方在论坛上确定的需求。能力建设活动还将包括波多黎各大学博士生和本科生之间的合作实地考察，关于电力和基础设施发展的一系列讲习班，制定年度住宅东北复原力奖学金计划，以促进波多黎各和东北地区的学者之间的思想交流，以及由波多黎各大学和东北大学的教员共同教授的跨学科在线能源正义课程。这一合作研究项目收集了新的数据，这些数据用于建立由联合PIS开发的现有数据集，该数据集以前是由NSF资助的工作，在飓风玛丽亚之前。该项目集中于两个核心目标，调查电力的社会技术想象是如何在整个20世纪融入波多黎各电力系统并与之一起演变的，以及比较飓风玛丽亚毁灭性破坏前后对能源未来的不同看法。研究小组将采用混合方法，将档案和政策研究与访谈相结合。这项研究的结果将为决策提供有影响力的经验性见解，并将为基础设施和社会技术转型的社会研究提供理论进步。此外，这些结果有望对基础设施系统和社会技术转型方面的文献进行改进和联系，具有变革的潜力。它们还将通过扩展其分析视角以考虑波多黎各的情况，为现有的美国电力系统跨学科社会研究提供重要的纠正；它们将揭示毗邻的美国的大规模电力系统(电网)的发展如何立即形成并与波多黎各的电力发展轨迹相抵触。它还提供了一个独特的机会，以建立一个比较数据集的灾前(通过以前的NSF支持的工作)和灾后的电力部门的过渡愿景，这将使该项目能够推进和支持一个细微差别的分析灾难如何支持基础设施的重新排序。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为值得支持使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准的评估。

This award supports a collaborative research effort between social science scholars from Northeastern University and the University of Puerto Rico. The goal of the project is to compare sociotechnical imaginaries, which are imagined forms of social order that center on the development of an innovative technological project; in this case, the project of interest is the electric power system in Puerto Rico (an unincorporated territory of the US). The project will map over time how different imaginaries have been encoded within the material and social outlines of electric power on the island, and it will reflect on how a disastrous event, Hurricane Maria, served to create opportunities for different imaginaries to circulate. The results of this research will contribute to important, evolving public discussions about Puerto Rico's energy future. The dissemination plan includes bringing marginalized voices into the mainstream political conversations including contributing to policy briefs that address needs identified by stakeholders in the stakeholder forum. Capacity-building activities will also include collaborative fieldwork between Northeastern PhD students and undergraduate students at the University of Puerto Rico, a workshop series concerning power and infrastructure development, the development of an annual residential Northeastern Resilience Fellowship program to facilitate the exchange of ideas between scholars in Puerto Rico and Northeastern, and an interdisciplinary on-line energy justice course co-taught by faculty at University of Puerto Rico and Northeastern. This collaborative research project collects new data that serves to build on an existing dataset developed by the Co-PIs previously NSF-funded work prior to Hurricane Maria. The project focuses on two core objectives, to investigate how sociotechnical imaginaries of electric power were built into and evolved with the electric power system in Puerto Rico throughout the 20th century, and to compare different visions of energy futures before and after the devastating disruption of Hurricane Maria. The research team will use a mixed-methods approach that integrates archival and policy research with interviews. The results of this research will provide impactful empirical insights with relevance to decision-making, and it will provide theoretical advances for social studies of infrastructure and sociotechnical transitions. In addition, these results promise to have transformative potential to advance and link the literatures on infrastructure systems and sociotechnical transitions. They will also provide an important corrective to existing interdisciplinary social studies of the U.S. electric power system by expanding its analytic lens to consider the case of Puerto Rico; they will shed light on how the development of the bulk electric power system (the power grid) in the contiguous United States at once shapes and is at odds with the trajectory of electric power in Puerto Rico. It also presents a unique opportunity to build a comparative dataset of pre-disaster (generated through prior NSF-supported work) and post-disaster visions of transitions in the electricity sector, which will enable this project to advance and support a nuanced analysis of how disasters can support infrastructure reordering.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.