RUI: Disposition: The Army Corps of Engineers and the Reimagining of the Upper Mississippi River

Macalester College, Saint Paul MN

Investigators

Abstract

This award provides funds for a two-year project that aims to study a large study that is currently being conducted by the Army Corps of Engineers (ACE). In 2018, ACE officially began its process of reimagining the Upper Mississippi River when Congress charged the agency to conduct a disposition study to examine the costs and benefits of continuing to operate three federal projects which no longer serve their authorized purposes. ACE’s multiyear study will ask what value the American public derives from the federal government’s operation of these projects. The aim of the two-year project that is being funded by this award aims to both inform and shape the ACE’s engagement and decision-making process in real time. The research will document, interpret and experiment with public engagement processes around the ACE’s Upper Mississippi River disposition study. The research will increase the societal understandings of these challenges through its public facing efforts, including a project website and presentations of local seminars. The findings will be shared with downriver Mississippi research groups in St. Louis and New Orleans. In addition, the team will work with artists to create a multimedia, immersive night-time public art installation called “Illuminate the Lock” that seeks to open new conversations about the river’s future. The project also provides intensive undergraduate training opportunities through a suite of course-based modules and summer research fellowships. Students will be mentored by an interdisciplinary academic group who are deeply invested in community-based research and publicly engaged scholarship. The project asks three main questions: How is the ACE engaging diverse publics in considering what value locks and dams provide in the upper basin? Which modes of engagement open up or close down imaginings of a future river? How might alternative forms of participation aid policymaking by engaging more inclusive forms of deliberation? The project pursues three stages of qualitative research to address these questions. The research team will review the public processes and outcomes of recent, smaller ACE disposition studies in Kentucky, Georgia and Maine. They also plan to observe, record and analyze the format and testimony delivered at ACE disposition hearings in 2020-2021. Finally, the team will design a series of focus groups that serve to perpendicularly record public opinion through a series of Upper Mississippi walking, biking and Paddleboat excursions led by expert guides in Minneapolis and St. Paul. This research project synergizes two exciting areas of STS scholarship: critical infrastructural theory and public engagement studies. In the context of river engineering, and ACE disposition studies, the research will examine both the limitations of conventional administrative practice and how STS interventions can steer agencies toward more inclusive, reflexive and creative public engagement. The research team will publish peer reviewed articles in journals such as Science as Culture and Environmental Planning, as well as a special issue of the open access journal Open Rivers. 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.