This postdoctoral fellowship will support research on water infrastructure in Panama; it focuses specifically on the networked infrastructures that supplies water for both shipping and municipal use. The project has three phases focusing respectively on installation, maintenance, and use. Each phase is structured in terms of a core question. The first phase asks how the water management infrastructure that links the canal with the two cities at its endpoints, Panama and Colon, shaped system development and regional water distribution problems. It will be answered through historical research at archives in the US and Panama. The second asks how expectations and practices of infrastructure maintenance compare between the two institutions that manage water in the study region. This question will be answered through participant observation and interviews with work crews and administrators at both water management institutions. The third asks how urban water users perceive delivery problems and develop household strategies to cope with them. This question will be answered through semi-structured interviews and participant observation in urban Panama.
Intellectual Merit
The project will advance scholarship in three areas. It will merge STS scholarship on infrastructure and political ecology in a novel manner resulting in a new, powerful framework that will benefit both fields. It will utilize the new framework to advance scholarship in the emerging Science and Technology Studies subfield, Water Studies. Finally, it will provide evidence to better theorize how infrastructure functions across geographical and cultural differences, illuminating how these systems work when irregular maintenance and service interruption are a part of everyday life.
Potential Broader Impacts
Infrastructures have become visible sites of economic anxiety, political struggle, and ecological crisis in recent years. Communities worldwide face problems of service delivery associated with aging infrastructure and state budgetary shortfalls. The research will generate new knowledge about technology, society, and ecology under these conditions that is relevant to engineers, planners, and administrators who seek to design and manage socio-technical systems in more culturally appropriate, equitable, and sustainable ways. The project will illuminate how urban water problems are produced and might be ameliorated. Findings will be disseminated to multiple audiences through academic conferences, publications in peer-reviewed journals, public workshops, and the training of engineering students.
