schaffer_project_hopping


 * TOPICAL AREA? || Participatory planning of municipal/ neighborhood composting system || Industrial composting as an emerging trend in waste management/ “resource management” || Human microbiomes/ beneficial microbes ||
 * DATA SETS? || Participant observation at planning meetings; interviews with organizers, activists, city officials, MSW workers, residents; broader survey data of residents in order to assess reactions; advocacy work. || Participant observation at Composting Council Conferences, Resource Conservation and Recovery office of EPA, or with a small selection of resource management companies and offices; Interviews with resource management officials, employees; discourse analysis of resource management literatures; quantitative data on resource recovery and landfill rates. || Discourse analysis of science communication, probiotic supplement ads, online fora/ communities; interviews with public figures, yogurt manufacturers, microbiome researchers; participant observation at Beneficial Microbes conference or Human Microbiome Project Working Group; education work through possible bio-art project at Sanctuary for Independent Media. ||
 * SOCIAL THEORETICAL QUESTIONS? || How can citizens take part in the design of utilities? Who gets left out of these decisions, who has less say, how do some voices get marginalized and how can they get heard? How can citizens influence seemingly trivial aspects of city services? How do social movements (the Transition movement, local agriculture movements) influence the governance of small communities? || Who benefits from sustainability projects? How do societies decide what is waste and what isn’t? How do societies decide what to do with waste/resources? What discursive formations are at play in waste policy? How do issues get marked as “environmental,” and what power does that label carry? || How do people make sense of competing/ confusing health information from biomedicine, alternative medicine, drug companies, and embodied health? How do competing forms of expertise interact around the human microbiome? How do they bolster one another’s claims and how do they compete? How can non-institutional research and education re: human microbiomes happen more? ||
 * WHY NOW? || Because of social movements advocating for localized supply chains, because large-scale changes in resource management are moving in troubling directions (e.g. composting organic waste by transporting it 300 miles); because I have a case study. || Because large-scale changes in resource management are moving in troubling directions; because sustainability discourse possesses marketable salience; because there appears to be a nationwide shift in resource management, new agencies are being formed, and it’ll be interesting to examine how new practices congeal. || Because the human microbiome project at NIH is relatively young and relatively visible; because the probiotics industry grows markedly; because I don’t think human health can be adequately understood without bacterial health. ||
 * HOW PREPARED? || Have been active in composting group; have started reviews on technology assessment and waste management; I like interviewing people, but I still do it like a journalist, not an ethnographer. || Have contacts in resource management agencies and companies; have read up on ecological modernization theory and discard studies; seem to have street cred from involvement in compost advocacy. || Have contacts in human microbiome related labs; an interview with a prominent hookworm researcher; familiarity with labwork and science communication; accidentally volunteered to work with visiting bio-artists at Sanctuary. ||
 * BIAS? || I like compost, and for the most part presume more composting is a good thing; I am already involved in this advocacy project; not just ideological commitments but social pressures on my advocacy exist (but are endlessly fascinating). || I favor treadmill of production analyses over ecological modernization; I distrust large haulers and industrial-scale composting. || I romanticize citizen science and demonize pharmaceutical companies; I’m pretty excited about probiotics ||
 * FIELDS OF WORK? || Social movements, participatory technology assessment, expertise, ecological modernization, deliberative democracy, democratic governance of new technologies, practice theory possibly? || Ecological modernization, urban planning, discard studies. || Biomedicalization, citizen science, embodied health (movements?), laboratory studies, public understanding and engagement with science and technology, science communication. ||
 * FUNDERS || EPA, variety of small grants for learning about public engagement, US Composting Council?, NAS || EPA, US Composting Council?, possibly internships at compost orgs?, NAS || NIH, NAS, alternative medicine orgs? ||