| NSF Org: |
CBET Division of Chemical, Bioengineering, Environmental, and Transport Systems |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | August 26, 2013 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | June 19, 2018 |
| Award Number: | 1344238 |
| Award Instrument: | Continuing Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Bruce Hamilton
CBET Division of Chemical, Bioengineering, Environmental, and Transport Systems ENG Directorate for Engineering |
| Start Date: | September 1, 2013 |
| End Date: | December 31, 2018 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $796,792.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $872,326.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
FY 2014 = $132,500.00 FY 2016 = $75,534.00 |
| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
520 LEE ENTRANCE STE 211 AMHERST NY US 14228-2577 (716)645-2634 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
202 Jarvis Hall Buffalo NY US 14260-1660 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): |
SSA-Special Studies & Analysis, EnvS-Environmtl Sustainability, INSPIRE |
| Primary Program Source: |
01001415DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT 01001617DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT |
| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.041 |
ABSTRACT
1344238 (Rabideau). This INSPIRE award is partially funded by the NSF Engineering Directorate (ENG) and the NSF Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (SBE). This project is motivated by the long-standing prevalence of inactive waste sites resistant to the restoration of contaminated soil and groundwater. Recently, the National Research Council (NRC, 2012) identified thousands of complex sites, "complex" referring to a collection of physical, chemical, and regulatory factors that inhibit cleanup. Because the NRC committee was unable to identify potential technological breakthroughs, its report focused on the need for long-term management (LTM) of these sites, which will require many decades of cooperation between regulatory agencies, responsible parties, and host communities. While attention to LTM represents a progressive and positive development in the culture of groundwater restoration (GR), some compelling alternatives to LTM have not been fully evaluated, including: (1) a reinvigorated research agenda to develop cost-effective cleanup technologies, and (2) a paradigm shift from current practices (which emphasize technical analysis of health/cost tradeoffs) to a more holistic decision process informed by local stakeholder values and the core ideals of adaptive management, sustainability, environmental justice, and intergenerational equity. The INSPIRE team brings together scholars from environmental engineering, philosophy, sociology, and oral history to address important questions raised by the proposed shift to LTM: (1) to what extent has inadequate engineering implementation of remedial technologies contributed to failures to achieve cleanup targets (in contrast to the presumed inherent challenges of contaminated sites), (2) has the dominant risk-versus-cost paradigm adequately engaged the environmental values held by practitioners and stakeholders (including sustainability), (3) how has GR practice and policy development been shaped by group identify and differences in core values and beliefs among government regulators, responsible parties, technical professionals, citizens, and academic researchers, and (4) how should the concerns of community residents, who will be most affected by the transition to LTM, be appropriately engaged? Recognizing that the above questions are not easily addressed by disciplinary or "expert panel" research, this three-year INSPIRE project will emphasize the qualitative analysis of recorded audio data (RAD), collecting and analyzing 100-200 hours of RAD from focus groups, workshop dialogues, oral history testimonies, and phone interviews with a diverse community of professional, government, academic and citizen practitioners and stakeholders. Open-ended interviews are a well-established and appropriate vehicle to engage, study, and learn from the local, often undocumented, knowledge of the diverse communities that engage in complex projects such as GR. Using new database tools for thematically mapping anecdotal interviews as meaning-dense RAD, analytic methods such as frame analysis, applied collaboratively by the interdisciplinary team, will support the development of new decision paradigms for more effectively managing GR and complex waste sites. Disseminated results will include journal articles, practitioner-oriented workshops, and new tools to support collaborative scholarship. The project will advance the field of GR by critically examining the pervasive assumption that restoration to health-based levels is technological infeasible for most sites, and by assessing alternative paradigms such as reinvigorated basic research, adaptive management, and/or sustainability analysis. Two doctoral, one MS, and several undergraduate students will receive cutting-edge training in cross-disciplinary research. Furthermore, the experience of collaborative qualitative analysis of RAD data (by the entire research team working together) will constitute a new and potentially transformative model for research that fully integrates science, engineering, ethics, and policy.
PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
Despite great efforts and advancements in Groundwater restoration (GR) since the passage of the Superfund legislation, many industrial sites still have not been cleaned up to drinking water standards and/or to a status of unrestricted use. While overcoming technical obstacles to full cleanup remains a central focus of practitioners, a variety of legal, political, and local community issues may be equally influential on real-world decision making and site management. Through the complicated and often protracted process of managing subsurface contamination, GR practitioners have acquired rich but largely undocumented insights that are not bounded by their particular professional roles. As an exploratory research technique, oral history (OH) was used to document and query the experiences of a full spectrum of GR stakeholders, including community members, site owners, regulators, consultants, and researchers. The overall goal was to better understand a central research question: why does contaminated groundwater take so long to clean up?
Supported by the Integrated NSF Support Promoting Interdisciplinary Research and Education (INSPIRE), the project team brought together scholars from environmental engineering, oral history, philosophy, and sociology. With open-ended interviews serving as the primary 'data' for the project, the team worked together to advance the understanding of GR from a holistic lens, as well as through the more focused perspectives provided by the individual disciplines.
As a tool for interdisciplinary research, oral history offers many advantages, but also presents challenges when the interview content is extensive and diverse. To address these challenges, the project team developed new timecode-based indexing methods to provide more efficient processing of digitally recorded oral histories. New software techniques were developed for interviewing, reviewing, analyzing, and thematically coding interview content for retrieval of passages across a collection, by topic. For the GR content, digital indexing was used to develop a 'code frame' that organized 221 terms from 538 interview passages within 37 extended interviews; upon completion, the code frame supported research inquiries related to technical, ethical, and social aspects of the GR problem.
Analysis of the oral history content generated new insights on topics that include: (1) the plurality of values that motivate GR projects, (2) the perceived technical impracticability of restoring some complex sites, (3) the application of 'adaptive site management' to support more cost-effective cleanups, (4) the ethical and social implications of 'long-term management' as an alternative to aggressive cleanup, (5) the emerging role of 'high resolution site characterization' as an essential precursor to remedy selection, (6) the importance and value of community engagement in decision making, (7) the role of property values in determining local cleanup standards, and (8) the need for more focused technical education among practitioners and regulators. The resulting publications will provide methodological contributions to the field of oral history as well as substantive insights regarding groundwater restoration within the fields of environmental engineering, ethics, and sociology.
The INSPIRE project also included a supplemental effort directed at the potential role of citizen science (CS) in the long term management of cleanup sites. While very few applications of CS in groundwater restoration were encountered, conversations with CS experts and practitioners revealed several potential obstacles, including the disconnect between decision making and monitoring that characterizes most remediation projects, and the need for specialized training to collect samples from environmental media contaminated with toxic chemicals. Moving forward, it is most likely that CS will play a role in GR long-term management if relevant activity is introduced at the beginning of the remediation process, when project goals and decisions are most receptive to community inputs.
Last Modified: 05/06/2019
Modified by: Alan J Rabideau
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