Jessica M. Smith

The everyday lives of energy transitions: Contested sociotechnical imaginaries in the American West

This article brings together two growing literatures – on sociotechnical imaginaries in science and technology studies and on resource materialities in anthropology – to explore how two energy-producing communities in the American West understand the moral salience of energy systems and the place of labor within them. Studies of energy sociotechnical imaginaries overwhelmingly focus on the role that state and transnational actors play in shaping perceptions of the ‘good society’, rather than how these imaginaries inform and are transformed in the lived experience of everyday people. We illuminate the contested dimension of sociotechnical imaginaries and their positioning within structures of power that inform visions of moral behavior and social order. Whereas the role of energy in national imaginaries is grounded almost entirely in the consumption it enables, examining the everyday ethics of people who live and work in Colorado’s uranium-rich Western Slope and Wyoming’s coal-rich Powder River Basin reveals an insistence that ‘good’ energy systems also provide opportunities for dignified and well-paid blue-collar work. This imaginary, we argue, remains ‘bounded’ at a local scale rather than circulating more widely to gain national or international traction. Theorizing this boundedness illustrates not only the contested nature of sociotechnical imaginaries, but also the constraints that material assemblages and sediments of the past place on imagined futures.

Morals, Materials, and Technoscience The Energy Security Imaginary in the United States

This article advances recent scholarship on energy security by arguing that the concept is best understood as a sociotechnical imaginary, a collective vision for a “good society” realized through technoscientific-oriented policies. Focusing on the 1952 Resources for Freedom report, the authors trace the genealogy of energy security, elucidating how it establishes a morality of efficiency that orients policy action under the guise of security toward the liberalizing of markets in resource states and a robust program of energy research and development in the United States. This evidence challenges the pervasive historical anchoring of the concept in the 1970s and illustrates the importance of the genealogical approach for the emerging literature on energy and sociotechnical imaginaries. Exploring the genealogy of energy security also unpacks key social, political, and economic undercurrents that disrupt the seeming universality of the language of energy, leading the authors to question whether energy security discourse is appropriate for guiding policy action during ongoing global energy transitions.

Invisible innovators: how low-income, first-generation students use their funds of knowledge to belong in engineering

ABSTRACT Though engineering is often perceived as a pathway of upward mobility in the United States, very little is known about the experiences of undergraduate engineering students who come from low-income backgrounds or are the first in their families to attend college. The little research that does exist on low-income, first-generation (LIFG) engineering students is grounded in a deficiency perspective that emphasizes the barriers these students face: greater feelings of financial pressure and curriculum overload, along with lower family support, confidence in technical skill sets, satisfaction with instructors and satisfaction with the overall college experience. Our ethnographic research with LIFG students at a public engineering university and community college reveals that these barriers can create a sense of belonging uncertainty for them as engineering students. Yet our students were also able to draw on the funds of knowledge they acquired growing up in poor families and, when these funds of knowledge are validated, they establish a sense of belonging in engineering education and the profession.

Memoranda of understanding and the social licence to operate in Colorado’s unconventional energy industry: a study of citizen complaints

As growth in unconventional energy production has brought oil and gas development closer to Colorado’s Front Range communities, a desire for more local control over that development has resulted in bans and moratoria in a few communities. Memoranda of understanding (MOUs), signed between local governments and industry operators, are emerging as a policy tool to allow development to proceed while addressing the concerns of local communities. This study analyses how MOUs shape public opinion of unconventional energy production by comparing two communities on the northern edge of the Denver metropolitan area: Erie, which instituted one of the state’s first MOUs in 2012, and nearby Firestone, which does not have MOUs in place. Analysing complaints made to the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission suggests that the MOUs narrow the breadth of citizen complaints and increase citizen engagement with state governing bodies. Finally, we find that the most significant predictor of complaint volume is encroachment of drilling activities close to communities.

Colorado’s Fracking Debates: Citizen Science, Conflict and Collaboration

ABSTRACT Technological advancements in hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling have spurred a controversial boom in oil and gas production. In Colorado, these debates take place directly in the suburban metro corridor, where local governments are turning to memorandums of understanding (MOU), negotiated directly with industry operators, to shape industry activity. We show that in Erie, the town that first pioneered this policy tool, these MOUs ostensibly welcome public participation in the planning and deliberation process but can unintentionally reinforce scientism-based governance. Citizen science challenged the local government’s deficit model of the public, but it also shored up scientific authority and triggered a government imaginary of anti-fracking activists as an unruly public. Residents countered this imaginary by electing officials committed to public engagement and transparency, which opened up debates to encompass quality of life issues that had been sidelined by the original focus on competing scientific evidence about pollution. While fracking-related citizen science does not appear to be directly responsible for the government turnover and its attendant shift in governance, we suggest it did enhance civic engagement related to general issues of fiscal responsibility, ethics and transparency that did play a role in the election.

Climate change justice and corporate responsibility

Analysing the mining industrys evolving approach to corporate responsibility and human rights sheds light on some of the opportunities and challenges for corporations to play a role in promoting climate change justice. A focus on human rights can create tensions with the corporate social responsibility (CSR) programmes and policies, which are commonly discursively framed as being voluntary. Corporate efforts to respond to critics by adopting human rights policies will be viewed with scepticism without increased standardisation in reporting, and the success of these initiatives will depend on the quality of a firms engagement with communities to address local concerns aside from greenhouse gas emissions. Strong state regulation, enforcement and democratic politics must accompany the growing panoply of guidelines, principles, codes of conduct and standards to ensure the promotion of human rights.

Improving memorandums of understanding (MOUs) for oil and gas development: public perceptions of unconventional energy in Colorado's Front Range

The Colorado oil and gas (O&G) boom often sparks conflict as it encroaches on suburbs. These conflicts lead many communities to use a memorandum of understanding (MOU) as a policy tool to assert local control over development. Although an MOU had already been enacted, conflict arose in Adams County after a large-scale facility was proposed in the Wadley Farms neighbourhood. This study evaluates Adam Countys revisions of the MOU process. Our findings indicate that dissimilarities between the dynamic nature of O&G and the static nature of MOUs pose challenges and limit the effectiveness of these agreements.

Engineering Students’ Views of Corporate Social Responsibility: A Case Study from Petroleum Engineering

The mining and energy industries present unique challenges to engineers, who must navigate sometimes competing responsibilities and codes of conduct, such as personal senses of right and wrong, professional ethics codes, and their employers’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) policies. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is the current dominant framework used by industry to conceptualize firms’ responsibilities to their stakeholders, yet has it plays a relatively minor role in engineering ethics education. In this article, we report on an interdisciplinary pedagogical intervention in a petroleum engineering seminar that sought to better prepare engineering undergraduate students to critically appraise the strengths and limitations of CSR as an approach to reconciling the interests of industry and communities. We find that as a result of the curricular interventions, engineering students were able to expand their knowledge of the social, rather than simply environmental and economic dimensions of CSR. They remained hesitant, however, in identifying the links between those social aspects of CSR and their actual engineering work. The study suggests that CSR may be a fruitful arena from which to illustrate the profoundly sociotechnical dimensions of the engineering challenges relevant to students’ future careers.