Abstract
This report describes the evolution of a qualitative research design used in a study that integrated academic and non-academic expertise and involved multiple stakeholders concerned with the diversion of human urine from the waste stream for its re-use in agriculture. The study took place in two regions of the U.S., New England and the Upper Midwest (most specifically Vermont and Michigan) and suggests the importance of ethnographic perspectives in a participatory action research framework going forward. This manuscript presents a novel mix of researchers, from a grassroots organization to R1 University teams, and explores the perspectives of a wide range of research participants with whom we conferred to understand whether and how fertilizers made from nutrients recovered from diverted urine might be accepted, adapted, and scaled in agricultural use. Our manuscript thus articulates new territory for such interpretive social science work (focus groups, interviews and participant observations) neither within basic ethnographic research, nor within the kind of “rapid ethnography” widely used in business, engineering and international development fields. We describe how our research process entailed the modifications of our methods, and we consider the overlapping and sometimes opposed knowledges and attitudes of multiple stakeholders who are crucial to the uptake and scale of such new technologies for closing loops in our waste and water processing infrastructures and our food production systems. To best leverage these diverse knowledges, we suggest incremental steps for teams like ours towards an inclusive research process.
Highlights
In 2016 the National Science Foundation’s INFEWS program (Innovations at the Nexus of Food, Water, and Energy) funded engineers and an anthropologist from the University of Michigan (UM) to join scholars from the State University of New York at Buffalo (SUNY) and research staff from the Rich Earth Institute in Brattleboro, Vermont in an integrative research project that constituted for all participants involved a new kind of multi-stakeholder collaboration
We discovered that our research instruments and approaches had to be iterative, to respect what we were hearing from our study subjects, and to be accountable to their changing experiences
In our vision of action research going forward, individuals from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences join with researchers to inform ongoing science around alternative waste management approaches, including urine-derived fertilizers (UDFs) treatment and processing, and to shape implementation, regulation and policies around such projects
Summary
In 2016 the National Science Foundation’s INFEWS program (Innovations at the Nexus of Food, Water, and Energy) funded engineers and an anthropologist from the University of Michigan (UM) to join scholars from the State University of New York at Buffalo (SUNY) and research staff from the Rich Earth Institute in Brattleboro, Vermont in an integrative research project that constituted for all participants involved a new kind of multi-stakeholder collaboration. Indicate that those three strands each entail complex multi-stakeholder processes. To pursue them carefully requires innovations in integrative and dialogical research methods, and suggests the importance of ethnographic perspectives in an action research framework going forward. This paper documents the evolution of our methods given responses from our study participants, who seek to connect with one another and with us as partners in the innovation process
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