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- Genre: Doctoral Dissertation
Description
This document builds a model, the Resilience Engine, of how a given sociotechnical innovation contributes to the resilience of its society, where the failure points of that process might be, and what outcomes, resilient or entropic, can be generated by the uptake of a particular innovation. Closed systems, which tend towards stagnation and collapse, are distinguished from open systems, which through ongoing encounters with external novelty, tend towards enduring resilience. Heterotopia, a space bounded from the dominant order in which novelty is generated and defended, is put forth as the locus of innovation for systemic resilience, defined as the capacity to adapt to environmental changes. The generative aspect of the Resilience Engine lies in a dialectic between a heterotopia and the dominant system across a membrane which permits interaction while maintaining the autonomy of the new space. With a model of how innovation, taken up by agents seeking power outside the dominant order, leads to resilience, and of what generates failures of the Resilience Engine as well as successes, the model is tested against cases drawn from two key virtual worlds of the mid-2000s. The cases presented largely validate the model, but generate a crucial surprise. Within those worlds, 2008-2010 saw an abrupt cultural transformation as the dialectic stage of the Resilience Engine's operation generated victories for the dominant order over promising emergent attributes of virtual heterotopia. At least one emergent practice has been assimilated, generating systemic resilience, that of the conference backchannel. A surprise, however, comes from extensive evidence that one element never problematized in thinking about innovation, the discontent agent, was largely absent from virtual worlds. Rather, what users sought was not greater agency but the comfort of submission over the burdens of self-governance. Thus, aside from minor cases, the outcome of the operation of the Resilience Engine within the virtual worlds studied was the colonization of the heterotopic space for the metropolis along with attempts by agents both external and internal to generate maximum order. Pursuant to the Resilience Engine model, this outcome is a recipe for entropic collapse and for preventing new heterotopias from arising under the current dominant means of production.
ContributorsMcKnight, John Carter (Author) / Miller, Clark (Thesis advisor) / Hayes, Elisabeth (Committee member) / Allenby, Braden (Committee member) / Daer, Alice (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
This research identifies several barriers to large scale implementation of solar photovoltaics into the modern US electricity system, along with solutions to help mitigate these challenges. The need for new technologies and utility rate plans are identified as two of these key barriers. In place of expensive, developing technologies this research explores the use of thermal energy storage (TES), a widely used, inexpensive, mature technology as a potential solution for a portion of this problem. A real-life example from Arizona State University (ASU) is used to illustrate the potential of TES. In addition, shortcomings of modern electricity rate plans are identified using both cost and system characteristics of residential solar and battery systems. This rate and system modeling also gives insight into the value that solar can provide to residential customers in a variety of settings.
ContributorsRouthier, Alexander F (Author) / Honsberg, Christiana (Thesis advisor) / Hedman, Mojdeh (Committee member) / Kurtz, Sarah (Committee member) / Miller, Clark (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
This thesis examines the composition, flow rate, and recyclability of two abundant materials generated in modern society: municipal sewage sludge (SS) generated during conventional wastewater treatment, and single-use plastic packaging (specifically, plastic bottles) manufactured and dispersed by fast-moving consumer goods companies (FMCG). The study found the presence of 5 precious metals in both American and Chinese sewage sludges. 13 rare elements were found in American sewage sludge while 14 were found in Chinese sewage sludge. Modeling results indicated 251 to 282 million metric tons (MMT) of SS from 2022 to 2050, estimated to contain some 6.8 ± 0.5 MMT of valuable elements in the USA, the reclamation of which is valued at $24B ± $1.6B USD. China is predicted to produce between 819 - 910 MMT of SS between 2022 and 2050 containing an estimated 14.9 ± 1.7 MMT of valuable elements worth a cumulative amount of $94B ± 20B (Chapter 2 and 3). The 4th chapter modeled how much plastic waste Coca-Cola, PespiCo and Nestlé produced and globally dispersed in 21 years: namely an estimated 126 MMT ± 8.7 MMT of plastic. Some 15.6 MMT ± 1.3 MMT (12%) is projected to have become aquatic pollution costing estimated at $286B USD. Some 58 ± 5 MMT or 46% of the total mass were estimated to result in terrestrial plastic pollution, with only minor amounts of 9.9 ± 0.7 MMT, deemed actually recycled. Absent of change, the three companies are predicted to generate an additional 330 ± 15 MMT of plastic by 2050, thereby creating estimated externalities of $8 ± 0.4 trillion USD. The analysis suggests that a small subset of FMCG companies are well positioned to change the current trajectory of global plastic pollution and ocean plastic littering. Chapter 5 examined the barriers to Circular Economy. In an increasingly uncertain post pandemic world, it is becoming progressively important to conserve local resources and extract value from materials that are currently interpreted a “waste” rather than a current or potential future resource.
ContributorsBiyani, Nivedita (Author) / Halden, Rolf U. (Thesis advisor) / Allenby, Braden (Committee member) / Jalbert, Kirk (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
Northeastern Arizona has experienced a recent increase in helium extraction activity. This qualitative case study articulates and explores various sociotechnical imaginaries – or, collectively produced social justifications for technological decisions and systems – that inform this new stage of underground helium extraction. Leveraging two years of interviews, document analysis, and participant observations to understand and interrogate the political and cultural origins of perceptions around helium extraction, I examined how these imaginaries and associated power dynamics influenced communication within and between stakeholder groups. In order to mitigate the power differentials between stakeholder groups, and put these imaginaries in conversation with each other, I led the development of a series of short videos that explain controversial technoscientific concepts from this research. These videos were produced in continuous collaboration with multiple disparate stakeholders, including activists, regulators, and industry members, in order to create a space for a productive conversation and reflection to explore tensions between conflicting points of view between stakeholders. This iterative work used the imaginaries of helium extraction in Arizona to produce a space for collective deliberation that can result in negotiated shared knowledge through brokered dialogue amongst these disparate groups and their competing visions of Arizona’s helium futures.
ContributorsBruhis, Noa (Author) / Jalbert, Kirk (Thesis advisor) / Richter, Jennifer (Thesis advisor) / Williams, Wendy R (Committee member) / Jenkins, Lekelia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
This research interconnects three case studies to examine survivability as a framework through which to explore historic, current, and future collaborations in the face of existential threats, social-ecological-technical uncertainty, and indeterminate futures. Leveraging archival research, document analysis, and ethnographic field work, this study focuses on artist Georgia O’Keeffe’s mid-20th-century construction of a nuclear fallout shelter, the COVID Tracking Project’s response work in the first year of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, and three decades of future-facing scientific research performed at Biosphere 2. These cases demonstrate multidisciplinary collaborations across individual, organizational, and institutional configurations at local, national, and international scales in threat contexts spanning nuclear weapons, pandemics, and increasing climate catastrophe. Within each of the three cases, I examine protagonists’ collaborations within knowledge systems, their navigation of scientific disciplinary boundaries, their acknowledgement and negotiation of credibility and expertise, and how their engagements with these systems impact individual and collective survivability. By combining complex adaptive systems (CAS) framings with Science and Technology Studies concepts, I explore ways in which transformations of hierarchy and epistemological boundaries impact, and particularly increase, social-ecological-technical systems (SETS) survivability. Including notions of who and what systems deem worthy of protection, credibility, expertise and agency, imaginations, and how concepts of systems survivability operate, this work builds a conceptual scaffolding to better understand the dynamic workings of quests for survival in the 21st century.
ContributorsWasserman, Sherri (Author) / Selin, Cynthia (Thesis advisor) / Richter, Jennifer (Committee member) / Jalbert, Kirk (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
Solar energy is a disruptive technology within the electricity industry, and rooftop solar is particularly disruptive as it changes the relationship between the industry and its customers as the latter generate their own power, sell power to the grid, and reduce their dependence on the industry as the sole source provider of electric power. Hundreds of thousands of people in the western United States have made the decision to adopt residential rooftop solar photovoltaic technologies (solar PV) for their homes, with some areas of western cities now having 50% or more of homes with solar installed. This dissertation seeks to understand how rooftop solar energy is altering the fabric of urban life, drawing on three distinct lenses and a mixed suite of methods to examine how homeowners, electric utilities, financial lenders, regulators, solar installers, realtors, and professional trade organizations have responded to the opportunities and challenges presented by rooftop solar energy. First, using a novel solar installation data set, it systematically examines the temporal, geographic, and socio-economic dynamics of the adoption of rooftop solar technologies across the Phoenix metropolitan area over the decade of the 2010s. This study examines the broad social, economic, and urban environmental contexts within which solar adoption has occurred and how these have impacted differential rates of solar uptake. Second, using survey and real estate data from the Phoenix metropolitan area, it explores how solar energy has begun to shape important social and market dynamics, illuminating how decision-making in real estate transactions, including by buyers, sellers, agents, lenders, and appraisers is shifting to accommodate houses with installed solar systems. Lastly, the study explores patterns of rooftop solar adoption across major electric utilities and what those can tell us about the extent to which corporate social responsibility and sustainability reporting have affected the practices of investor-owned electric utilities (IOU) within the western US.
ContributorsO'Leary, Jason (Author) / Fisher, Erik (Thesis advisor) / Miller, Clark (Thesis advisor) / Dirks, Gary (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
Existing models of military innovation assume general resistance to change within militaries that necessitates an outside influence to induce military innovation. Within these approaches, the complex relationship between technology and innovation is normally addressed by either minimizing the importance of technology or separating it from the social process of innovation. Yet these approaches struggle to reflect emerging dynamics between technology and military innovation, and as a result, potentially contribute to wasted national resources and unnecessarily bloody wars. Reframing the relationship between technology and military innovation can provide novel insights into the apparent inability of militaries to align technology with strategic goals and inform more effective future alignment. This dissertation leverages the insights of constructivist science and technology studies concepts to develop a novel model of military innovation: referred to here as the technology triad. The technology triad describes military sociotechnical systems in a way that highlights change and innovation within militaries. The model describes how doctrine, materiel, and “martial knowledge,” a new concept that relates to socially constructed truths about the conduct of war, interact to produce change and innovation within militaries. After constructing the model and exploring an in-depth application to the development of armored warfare in the United States Army prior to World War II, the case from which the model was developed, the dissertation explores the logical extension of the technology triad to establish a deductive framework against which to test the generalizability of the model. Nuclear weapons innovation in the United States military through the end of the Vietnam War provides a test of the model at the strategic level, and the development and employment of armed drones in the United States, Russia, Israel, and Azerbaijan provide a test of a contemporary innovation for the technology triad. Together, these three cases demonstrate that framing the relationship between technology and military innovation in terms of the technology triad can inform concrete actions that military leaders can take related to the types of technologies that are most likely to be useful in future conflicts and ways to manage military innovations to increase opportunities to achieve strategic objectives.
ContributorsSickler, Robert (Author) / Maynard, Andrew (Thesis advisor) / Kubiak, Jeff (Committee member) / Allenby, Braden (Committee member) / Jalbert, Kirk (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
This research will utilize the energy and poverty alleviation framework to investigate a sustainable energy ecosystem for the Wakapoa indigenous community of Guyana. Five questions guide the research – 1) Is there an energy access-development nexus? 2) Can the relationships and trends between key development indicators and electricity access guide policymakers on development activities? 3) Can small-scale concentrated solar and biomass systems provide adequate electrical power to meet the Wakapoa community's domestic and commercial loads economically? 4) What added social value could be generated from the energy system as per Wakapoa context? and 5) What governance systems can be considered to facilitate a sustainable energy ecosystem? In addressing questions 1 and 2, the research collected secondary data on selected countries' key development indexes from the World Bank and Our World in Data. Datasets include the human development index, human capital index, gross domestic product per capita, gross national income per capita, and electricity access. In addressing questions 3 to 5, the research utilized the convergent research design methods, where an inclusive data collection process targeted fifty (50) community residents as survey participants. Statistical analysis of the survey data proved useful in identifying the community needs for the renewable energy system design options utilizing system advisor model (SAM) software, identifying key economic activities that can add social value to the community, and giving key insight into governance practices preferred by the community. Key findings reveal that electricity access exerts a strong and moderate influence on key development indicators, the concentrated solar power and biomass hybrid system can satisfy the electricity demand of the community at the Tier-5 level that can support many traditional and non-traditional economic activities, while key governance support functions such as the community financial aid fund and community management committee can enhance the sustainability of the various operations as well as residents' well-being and livelihood. Future research can address project financing, community productive capacity, and the marketing of goods and services to promote a sustainable energy ecosystem.
ContributorsKanhai, Mahendra N. (Author) / Chhetri, Nalini (Thesis advisor) / Dirks, Gary (Thesis advisor) / Miller, Clark (Committee member) / Stechel, Ellen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
Effective collaboration and cooperation across difference are at the heart of present and future sustainability challenges and solutions. Collaboration among social groups (intragenerational), across time (intergenerational), and across species (interspecies) is each central to achieving sustainability transitions in the 21st century. In practice, there are three types of differences that limit collaboration and cooperation toward sustainability outcomes: differences among social groups, differences across time, and differences across species. Each of these differences have corresponding cognitive biases that challenge collaboration. Social cognitive biases challenge collaboration among social groups; temporal cognitive biases challenge collaboration across time; and anthropocentric cognitive biases challenge collaboration across species. In this work, I present three correctives to collaboration challenges spanning the social, temporal, and species cognitive biases through intervention-specific methods that build beyond traditional framings of empathy, toward social, futures, and ecological empathy. By re-theorizing empathy across these domains, I seek to construct a multidimensional theory of empathy for sustainability, and suggest methods to build it, to bridge differences among people, time horizons, and species for sustainability practice.
ContributorsLambert, Lauren Marie-Jasmine (Author) / Selin, Cynthia (Thesis advisor) / Schoon, Michael (Thesis advisor) / Tomblin, David (Committee member) / Berbés-Blázquez, Marta (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
This dissertation explores the intersection of two major developments in global
environmental governance: the vision for a Green Economy and the growing influence of non-state actors. The work draws on multi-sited thick description to analyze how relationships between the state, market, and civil society are being reoriented towards global problems. Its focus is a non-binding agreement between California and Chiapas to create a market in carbon offsets credits for Reducing Emissions for Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD). The study draws on three bodies of scholarship. From the institutionalist study of global environmental politics, it uses the ideas of orchestration, civil regulation, and private entrepreneurial authority to identity emerging alignments of state and non-state actors, premised on an exchange of public authority and private expertise. From concepts borrowed from science and technology studies, it inquires into the production, certification, and contestation of knowledge. From a constitutionalist perspective, it analyzes how new forms of public law and private expertise are reshaping foundational categories such as territory, authority, and rights. The analysis begins with general research questions applied to California and Chiapas, and the international space where groups influential in these sites are also active: 1) Where are new political and legal institutions emerging, and how are they structured? 2) What role does scientific, legal, and administrative expertise play in shaping these institutions, and vice versa? And 3) How are constitutional elements of the political order being reoriented towards these new spaces and away from the exclusive domain of the nation-state? The dissertation offers a number of propositions for combining institutionalist and constructivist approaches for the study of complex global governing arrangements. It argues that this can help identify constitutional reconfigurations that are not readily apparent using either approach alone.
environmental governance: the vision for a Green Economy and the growing influence of non-state actors. The work draws on multi-sited thick description to analyze how relationships between the state, market, and civil society are being reoriented towards global problems. Its focus is a non-binding agreement between California and Chiapas to create a market in carbon offsets credits for Reducing Emissions for Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD). The study draws on three bodies of scholarship. From the institutionalist study of global environmental politics, it uses the ideas of orchestration, civil regulation, and private entrepreneurial authority to identity emerging alignments of state and non-state actors, premised on an exchange of public authority and private expertise. From concepts borrowed from science and technology studies, it inquires into the production, certification, and contestation of knowledge. From a constitutionalist perspective, it analyzes how new forms of public law and private expertise are reshaping foundational categories such as territory, authority, and rights. The analysis begins with general research questions applied to California and Chiapas, and the international space where groups influential in these sites are also active: 1) Where are new political and legal institutions emerging, and how are they structured? 2) What role does scientific, legal, and administrative expertise play in shaping these institutions, and vice versa? And 3) How are constitutional elements of the political order being reoriented towards these new spaces and away from the exclusive domain of the nation-state? The dissertation offers a number of propositions for combining institutionalist and constructivist approaches for the study of complex global governing arrangements. It argues that this can help identify constitutional reconfigurations that are not readily apparent using either approach alone.
ContributorsMonfreda, Chad (Author) / Miller, Clark (Thesis advisor) / Hurlbut, James (Committee member) / Abbott, Kenneth (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015