Doctoral Dissertation Research: Cultural Economic Understandings of Work under Ecological Restoration

应对当今环境退化的规模需要协调多个具有专业劳动力、技能和知识体系的工作人员。现有的研究探索环境行动和劳动力之间的关系往往集中在自愿参与的个人行为者。关于承包生态恢复项目的工人如何了解自己和自己的劳动，人们知之甚少。本博士论文研究通过对工人行为的影响来调查生态恢复的功效。除了提供资金培训一名人类学研究生掌握经验科学数据收集和分析方法外，还将与政府和非政府组织以及其他组织分享这项研究的结果，以便改善积极参与减轻环境污染和退化的人的工作条件。该项目还致力于提高公众对科学和科学方法的理解，特别是对生态健康的科学管理。虽然恢复项目对确保生物圈的完整性至关重要，但研究假设，执行这些项目的责任分配不均匀，往往沿着先前存在的社会不平等的路线。它扩展了工作人类学和环境人类学的理论视角，同时将代表性不足的视角整合到科学史和科学社会学中。博士研究员使用民族志，视觉和档案的方法相结合（包括基础设施绘图，反思备忘录，参与者观察，生活史访谈，工作流程观察，文本和话语分析）调查生态恢复的基础设施劳动，并展示环境不公正如何在各种环境中发挥作用。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得支持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。

Responses to the scale of environmental degradation today requires the coordination of multiple workers with specialized labors, skills, and knowledge systems. Existing research exploring the relationship between environmental action and labor tend to focus on individual actors who participate voluntarily. Less is known about how workers contracted in projects of ecological restoration come to understand themselves and their labor. This doctoral dissertation research investigates the efficacy of ecological restoration through its impacts on worker behavior. In addition to providing funding for the training of a graduate student in anthropology in the methods of empirical, scientific data collection and analysis, findings from this research will be shared with governmental and non-governmental organizations, and others with the aim of improving working conditions for those actively involved in ameliorating environmental pollution and degradation. The project also endeavors to enhance public understanding of science and the scientific method, specifically regarding the scientific management of ecological health.While restoration projects are critical for ensuring the integrity of the biosphere, the research hypothesizes that the responsibilities of carrying them out are unevenly distributed, often along lines of pre-existing social inequalities. It extends theoretical perspectives from the anthropology of work and environmental anthropology, while integrating under-represented perspectives into the history and sociology of science. The doctoral researcher uses a combination of ethnographic, visual, and archival methods (including infrastructural mapping, reflexive memos, participant observation, life history interviews, workflow observation, and textual and discourse analysis) to investigate the infrastructural labor of ecological restoration and demonstrate how environmental injustice plays out in various settings.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.