Collaborative Research: Sociotechnical Imaginaries, Infrastructure Publics, and Electricity

Northeastern University, Boston MA

Investigators

Abstract

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.