schaffer_empirical_conceptual_met

This project is based largely in participatory action research with compost advocates in Troy, New York. In this work, I and others investigate local waste systems, community dynamics and other types of composting projects elsewhere in order to develop a community-based food waste management system. This will involve successive and thoughtful efforts at implementing and improving a composting system while working with community members to determine how to create a community-focused organics recycling system. Participant observation at community meetings is a given, interviews with organizers, policymakers, administrators and citizens-not-involved is a must, and surveys of residents are certainly a possibility. Recognizing that these efforts are not taking place in a vacuum, but rather in response to and anticipation of other changes in local and national waste regimes, the project will also include historical analysis of organics recycling systems and policies elsewhere, interviews with influential consultants, businesspeople, and public officials, and (maybe?) participant observation within ecologically-oriented waste management systems. With luck, presentations at composting conferences will generate conversation and feedback with waste/resource management experts.
 * Methodological**

This project will contribute to the empirical understanding of community organizing around city planning and environmental issues, and the neoliberalization of American resource management. On the citizen organizing side, it will ask how citizen groups form around nebulous issues, how these groups exclude certain voices, how these groups define their problems, how they determine solutions, and how they work toward change. This aspect will largely draw on work with Troy Compost, but will also pull in insights from similar projects if available. Re: the neoliberalization of American resource management, the project will develop an understanding of the emergence of large corporations that handle organic waste and recycling under the flag of environmentalism, while probing the social and environmental impacts of "green" businesses. Together, these projects will use the realm of foodscraps composting to examine how environmental decision-making is navigated among various levels of scale and actors.
 * Empirical**

The project aims to contribute to perennial debates over ecological modernization/treadmill of production theory and to critique of neoliberal models of environmental governance. Further, it aims to shore up conceptions of the role of sociability in social movements and develop theories about the role of anticipation in planning sociotechnical futures. To add to this already wobbly pile, it will expand on Zsuzsa Gille's concept of a //waste regime// by accounting for resistance and counter-hegemonic conceptions of waste.
 * Conceptual**

This project will help to establish a municipal/community composting system in Troy and generate insights that can help in the organization of other community-based resource management and city-planning systems, which may or may not result in popular-press expostulations on the topic. It will also produce insight into green businesses and eco-preneurship that miiiiight be able to influence future private-public partnerships on environmental issues.
 * Practical**