Doctoral Dissertation Research: Infrastructures, Social Transformations and Resource Extraction in Contested Contexts

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This research investigates how social change occurs in communities economically dependent on the extraction of natural resources. Social scientists have found that areas with large deposits of natural resources are prone to conflict. Yet, as episodes of conflict garner news attention, less is known about the everyday ways that community members navigate the resource extraction infrastructures (security walls, shipping ports, conveyor belts) with which they live. This project investigates how communities make infrastructure a platform for demanding economic benefits, legal rights, and/or territorial control. It examines if and how these efforts, in turn, effect communities’ economic and social wellbeing. Through a focus on extractive infrastructures, this project improves understandings of resources and societal change. In addition to providing training for a graduate student training in methods of scientific data collection and analysis, the findings will be valuable to policy researchers and policy makers interested in conflict resolution and natural resource extraction.Research will be conducted in a community facing questions of who controls local natural resources in an effort to qualitatively understand how community members navigate infrastructures. Methods will include participant observation and rigorous documentation of (1) community life, daily work, and activities among these communities and (2) of the corporations carrying out the extraction. The doctoral student will augment these qualitative techniques with extensive formal and informal interviews, oral histories, media analysis, and archival research. By investigating how extractive infrastructure effects community members and how communities, in turn, engage those same infrastructures when demanding socio-economic change, this research generates critical knowledge of social change and conflict in resource rich regions.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.