CAS-Climate DCL: Workshop: Retrofitting Energy Justice

University Of Washington, Seattle WA

Investigators

Abstract

The global transition to a renewable energy system requires engagement from all parts of society. Innovative solutions to climate change require not only constructing the new, but also retrofitting what exists, including adapting existing buildings and climate proofing existing infrastructures. The workshop supported by this grant aims to gather and extend work at the intersection of maintenance and repair studies with environmental justice to examine the need for infrastructure retrofitting. By bringing together researchers from the fields of science and technology studies (STS), human computer interaction (HCI), urban studies, indigenous studies, and environmental engineering with diverse members of maintenance and repair communities, energy transition initiatives can excavate, recover, and reclaim the retrofitting practices and social histories that center repair as a life-sustaining practice and an everyday form of sustainability. This examination will begin by centering equity as an orienting approach to engineering not only a new physical relationship to the environment, but also a new social relationship to energy transition. The workshop targets to make three central contributions to research on energy justice and sustainable design. First, disparate social science and environmental engineering conversations on maintenance and repair will be connected to inform cross-disciplinary approaches to emissions mitigation. Second, a broadened understanding of the roles and effects of infrastructural retrofitting within the context of ongoing renewable energy transition projects will be emphasized. Third, the range of values, skill sets, and practices embedded in new and emerging forms of community-driven adaptation around energy infrastructure will be featured. The workshop seeks to locate retrofitting concerns at the core of energy transition thinking, practice, and development. 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.