Collaborative Research: NNA Research: Capturing Indigenous Knowledge to Co-Design more Effective Operations, Maintenance and Management of Water Infrastructure

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Navigating the New Arctic (NNA) is one of NSF's 10 Big Ideas. NNA projects address convergence scientific challenges in the rapidly changing Arctic. The Arctic research is needed to inform the economy, security and resilience of the Nation, the larger region and the globe. NNA empowers new research partnerships from local to international scales, diversifies the next generation of Arctic researchers, enhances efforts in formal and informal education, and integrates the co-production of knowledge where appropriate. This award fulfills part of that aim by addressing interactions among social systems, natural environment, and built environment in the following NNA focus areas: Resilient Infrastructure and Education. A challenge for rural water infrastructure systems in the Arctic is how to operate, manage, and maintain them successfully. Operations, maintenance, and management (OMM) that ensures continuous water access is difficult in these remote areas for many reasons, such as limited access to technical resources and to training across a broad range of skills. Building local workforce capacity and training has been recommended to address this OMM gap. However, underlying these recommendations is the assumption that the knowledge used to build the water systems matches the local knowledge of people operating and interacting with said systems. In rural Alaska, this is not always the case. This project seeks to bridge this gap between expected engineering know-how and the actual know-how of the local community. The approach supports local operators through developing water system OMM training material that is better grounded in local knowledge. At a systems scale, the project also develops educational material describing rural Alaskan water systems, aimed at educating the non-technical user community more broadly. Through bridging the connection between engineering and social context, this project empowers and broadens participation of the current and potential future engineering workforce. To make inroads into this challenge, this interdisciplinary research team engages in a three-phased approach that integrates principles from civil and environmental engineering, sociology, anthropology, and human computer interaction. Phase I characterizes the knowledge landscape between socio-cultural-technical knowledge domains. This is accomplished using ethnographic interviews that seek to understand daily practices that pertain to water, as well as how relevant local natural resources are classified and understood. This phase also uses artificial intelligence approaches, such as natural language processing, to assess the engineering knowledge expected for OMM as derived from existing water operator training and OMM support material. Phase II consists of mixed-modality focus groups to understand end-user valuations and expectations of water services and the development of cross-cultural information resources by mapping the mixed knowledge structures together to produce accessible OMM resources for operators. Phase III evaluates the knowledge transfer across domains of understanding with the hopes of developing protocols and materials that can scale across water systems and to other remote communities.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.