Collaborative Research: Sociotechnical Imaginaries, Infrastructure Publics, and Electricity

该奖项支持东北大学和波多黎各大学社会科学学者之间的合作研究工作。该项目的目标是比较社会技术想象，这是一种以创新技术项目的发展为中心的社会秩序的想象形式；在本例中，感兴趣的项目是波多黎各（美国的未合并领土）的电力系统。该项目将描绘出随着时间的推移，不同的想象是如何在岛上电力的物质和社会轮廓中被编码的，它将反映出灾难性事件，飓风玛丽亚，是如何为不同的想象创造机会的。这项研究的结果将有助于对波多黎各能源未来进行重要的、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，包括撰写政策简报，以解决利益攸关方论坛中利益攸关方确定的需求。能力建设活动还将包括东北大学的博士生和波多黎各大学的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，制定东北大学的年度住宅弹性奖学金计划，以促进波多黎各和东北大学学者之间的思想交流。以及一个跨学科的在线能源正义课程，由波多黎各大学和东北大学的教师共同教授。这个合作研究项目收集了新的数据，这些数据是建立在现有数据集的基础上的，这些数据集是由合作项目在飓风玛丽亚之前由美国国家科学基金会资助的工作开发的。该项目主要有两个核心目标，一是研究20世纪波多黎各电力系统中社会技术对电力的想象是如何形成和发展的，二是比较飓风“玛丽亚”造成毁灭性破坏之前和之后对能源未来的不同看法。研究团队将采用混合方法，将档案和政策研究与访谈相结合。本研究的结果将提供与决策相关的有影响力的实证见解，并将为基础设施和社会技术转型的社会研究提供理论进展。此外，这些结果有望具有变革潜力，以推进和联系有关基础设施系统和社会技术转型的文献。他们还将通过扩大其分析视角来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；它们将揭示美国邻近地区的大型电力系统（电网）的发展如何同时形成与波多黎各电力发展轨迹的矛盾。它还提供了一个独特的机会，可以建立灾前（通过先前nsf支持的工作生成）和灾后电力部门转型愿景的比较数据集，这将使该项目能够推进和支持对灾害如何支持基础设施重新排序的细致分析。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。

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.