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

本研究调查了经济上依赖于自然资源开采的社区如何发生社会变革。社会科学家发现，拥有大量自然资源的地区容易发生冲突。然而，随着冲突事件引起新闻关注，人们对社区成员在他们生活的资源开采基础设施（安全墙，航运港口，传送带）中的日常生活方式知之甚少。本项目研究社区如何使基础设施成为要求经济利益、法律的权利和/或领土控制的平台。它审查了这些努力是否以及如何反过来影响社区的经济和社会福祉。通过对采掘基础设施的关注，该项目提高了对资源和社会变革的理解。除了为研究生提供科学数据收集和分析方法的培训外，研究结果将对对冲突解决和自然资源开采感兴趣的政策研究人员和决策者很有价值，研究将在面临谁控制当地自然资源问题的社区进行，以便从质量上了解社区成员如何驾驭基础设施。方法将包括参与观察和严格的文件（1）社区生活，日常工作，和这些社区之间的活动和（2）进行提取的公司。博士生将通过广泛的正式和非正式访谈，口述历史，媒体分析和档案研究来增强这些定性技术。通过调查采掘基础设施如何影响社区成员，以及社区如何在要求社会经济变革时参与这些基础设施，这项研究产生了资源丰富地区社会变革和冲突的关键知识。该奖项反映了NSF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 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.