Christina Wasson

Environmental Governance in Multi-stakeholder Contexts: An Integrated Methods Set for Examining Decision-Making

Environmental governance is of growing concern in a world that is more interconnected and interdependent than ever and threatened by climate change and the depletion or contamination of natural resources that are often shared by multiple stakeholders. Governance at the local, national, and international level requires representatives of diverse stakeholder groups with often competing ideologies and interests to make decisions collaboratively (Buck et al. 2001; Folke et al. 2005; Wondolleck and Yaffee 2000). This collaborative decision-making often takes place in formalized groups who are given the responsibility for developing governmental regulations that determine how natural resources will be used and protected.

Integrating conversation analysis and issue framing to illuminate collaborative decision-making activities

A shift from top-down, hierarchical decision-making toward collaborative, consensus-oriented decision-making is taking place across many settings, leading to meetings in which diverse participants seek to reach agreement on issues of significance. This article proposes a new approach to analyzing such meetings that integrates conversation analysis (CA) and issue framing (IF). While CA and IF have both been applied to collaborative decision-making, each approach, on its own, suffers from significant limitations. Combined, they allow negotiation talk in meetings to be examined holistically, integrating a consideration of both process and content. New relationships among interactional sequences and framing processes are revealed, leading to the discovery of patterns across the decision-making activity as a whole. These patterns, in turn, can be situated in the context of the institutions within which the negotiations take place. This novel integrative approach is illuminated through application to a 162-turn decision-making activity.

Autonomous Vehicle Study Builds Bridges between Industry and Academia

Researchers have long explored the desirability and benefits of industry-university collaborations and acknowledge they can be fraught with difficulties. We examine one such alliance, focused on driverless cars, a current hot topic in the public imagination and in technology design. Our collaboration began as an alliance between two anthropologists, one a professor at the University of North Texas, the other a consultant with the Nissan Research Center in Sunnyvale, California. We designed a research project for a design anthropology course that Christina Wasson taught in Fall 2014. Brigitte Jordan, at the time, was conducting an informal ethnography class for engineers and computer scientists at NRC. Our alliance had two objectives: to determine what a successful industry-university collaboration could look like when it involves ethnographic research in the high-tech sector, and to provide insights into usable ethnographic methods and data that would support social and cultural questions in autonomous vehicle (AV) research at the Nissan center. We found these two geographically separated classes eventually allowed building bridges across academia and industry, anthropology and engineering, leading in the long run to some softening of the boundaries between the two disciplines. Here we discuss significant variance in the research cultures of class participants at UNT and NRC (ethnographers and automotive engineers), and the various manners in which these differences were bridged over the course of the project (or not, as the case may be). We explore factors which inhibit or encourage exchange between university and industry micro-cultures, consider reasons for the success or failure of such projects, and offer suggestions for improving future collaborations. We end with ideas about what a model for productive industry-academia collaboration could look like.