Collaborative Research: Retooling at the Hydro-Frontier: Devices for Resource Extraction in the 21st Century

Experts predict that water scarcity may cause future conflict. In response, scientists and technologists have developed new methods for maximizing the use of water as a resource, as well as for extracting resources found in water. This project examines such efforts, particularly technologies to make wastewater usable through membrane-based filtration technologies and retrofittable fermenters. It asks to what extent these new water extraction technologies reproduce existing social and environmental issues around water usage, or alternatively provide the basis for more equitable resource distribution systems in the twenty-first century. The project will support training graduate and undergraduate students in an interdisciplinary approach to conducting scientific data collection and analysis. It includes interactive exhibits for presentation at industry conferences and county fairs that help expert and everyday expert groups understand how they anticipate that technologies for retooling water resource extraction might contribute to addressing water and resource insecurity. The project will develop conceptual tools for understanding resource extraction in a future characterized by scarcity and conflict. It investigates how devices used for water resource extraction are being retooled in the early 21st century in response to anticipated challenges shaped by water quantity, water quality, and climate-related water risks. To do this, the research team will use historical, ethnographic, and arts-informed empirical research methods to examine how scientists, decision makers, and other stakeholders anticipate using already-existing membrane and wastewater fermentation technologies (devices) to extend and retool historical conceptions of where water exists, what constitutes a usable form of water/resource, and how water can be used. By studying these devices at new frontiers of water extraction, this project aims to develop the concept of retooling to help scholars describe the zone in between scholarship on maintenance and innovation; and to generate insights into broader shifts in resource extraction and innovation decisions. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.