Postdoctoral Fellowship: Energy, Risk and Urgency - Emergent Public Perceptions of Unconventional Oil and Gas Extraction

University Of California-Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara CA

Investigators

Abstract

General Audience Summary This postdoctoral research project proposes to examine public attitudes in the US and the UK on unconventional oil and gas extraction technologies. Specifically, the project will focus on ideas about urgency as they figure in emergent public views on the risks, benefits and impacts of technologies used in hydraulic fracturing (fracking) to access oil and gas in deep shale rock. The postdoc will engage in a comparative analysis of existing qualitative data on how diverse groups of everyday people in the US and the UK attach ideas about urgency to economic, environmental, social, and political aspects of new unconventional oil and gas technologies. The results of this project will be of interest to STS scholars, environmental scientists and engineers, industry specialists, and policymakers working in multiple fields including energy systems, climate change, environmental justice; more broadly, they will be of interest to any who have a stake in in the perceptions and anticipated behavior of diverse publics regarding present and future energy extraction, production, and consumption. Broad dissemination of research results will be achieved through publications, and through the preparation of a white paper report and a policy brief. Technical Summary The proposed project is a cross-national comparative case analysis of the effects of fracking technologies on diverse publics' social values, relationships, livelihoods and practices in the two study countries through the lens of urgency. A detailed, qualitative account of how urgency operates in emergent public attitudes on unconventional extraction technologies will contribute new scholarly understanding to key debates within both STS and risk perception literatures on responsibility, equity, trust, and governance, and broader issues of energy and society, all critical issues in the emerging field of Responsible Innovation. The proposed focus on urgency will provide a new perspective for examining technological controversies, and will systematize approaches for understanding its effects on amplification of risk and benefit perception. The comparative cross-national study will provide greater clarity about the processes in play in each country and their historical specificities in approaches to energy futures. The proposed analysis will be conducted using an existing set of extensive qualitative data collected from four public deliberation workshops convened in October 2014 by a collaborative team including the PI and co-PI of this project.