We know that impact assessment is designed to anticipate, assess and help avoid the negative impact of developments upon people and ecosystems, but what about the negative impacts of the IA process upon people? I had the opportunity to sit on the UA Master’s committee for Amy Wilson, who was supervised by my colleague John Parkins, while she explored the impacts of the IA process on the communities potentially affected by the Grassy Mountain Coal Project in southwestern Alberta. The paper from that work, Reversing the gaze: understanding how community members are negatively affected by impact assessment, was published OA this week in Impact Assessment and Project Appraisal. Three impact locations are identified and described using 49 interviews with experts and affected people: (1) risk perceptions and anticipatory impacts, (2) procedural issues, and (3) community and regional conflicts. Congratulations, Amy!
Category: Rural (Page 1 of 10)
Synthesis figure in the new Current Sociology paper showing sample workflows within a range of possibilities.
This week a new open access paper came out in a special issue (monograph) of Current Sociology about Social Impact Assessment. The special issue was led by Guadalupe Ortiz and Antonio Aledo, and their introductory essay is worth a read, as is Frank Vanclay’s epilogue, reflecting on 50 years of SIA and asking “is it still fit for purpose?”. Our offering, Social media and social impact assessment: Evolving methods in a shifting context, reflects on a decade of research using mostly Instagram to understand the social impacts of developments such as hydroelectricity, wind energy and coastal dyke realignment. The above demonstrates the current state of the art in terms of workflows, and shows how several of our studies have navigated those options. The paper also talks about the challenges, practical and ethical, of using social media datasets, and calls for government support in securing ongoing access for the purposes of public good research, a topic also recently argued by Ethan Zuckerman in Prospect Magazine. Most of the work synthesized in this paper has been published elsewhere, except the brilliant work that Mehrnoosh Mohammadi did on developing a collage approach to communicating common features in social media images to protect both copyright and privacy concerns (see below). This is a method we advocated back in 2017 and it is wonderful to see it in action.
A collage by Mehrnoosh Mohammadi of 16 photos captured in NS vineyards and posted on Instagram, showing seasonal change from left to right.
Amy Wilson (left) defended her MSc Rural Sociology in hybrid mode.
I enjoyed participating as a committee member on Tuesday as Amy Wilson defended her MSc in Rural Sociology at the University of Alberta. Frequent collaborator John Parkins was her supervisor for her project about the Grassy Mountain coal mine impact assessment process, called Navigating Conflict and Contention in Coal Country. Issues of identity associated with coal production has been an interest of mine for awhile, and serving on this committee allowed me to explore it vicariously. The defense led to a great conversation between the candidate and the examining committee, and sparked lots of ideas for where to go next. Congratulations, Amy!
Figure 2 process flowchart of the new Zhao et al. paper in Marine Policy
Another nice lab output this week in Marine Policy led by Qiqi Zhao, a China Scholarship Council visiting PhD student in my lab last year, including a bunch of other lab-affiliated students as co-authors: Modelling cultural ecosystem services in agricultural dykelands and tidal wetlands to inform coastal infrastructure decisions: a social media data approach. It is a bit of a companion piece to the Chen et al (2020) piece in Ocean and Coastal Management, as it uses the same Instagram dataset collected for every dykeland area in Nova Scotia back in 2018, but in a very different way. Chen et al. took a very qualitative ‘small data’ approach to the dataset, analyzing the photographs (and accounts) only of posts that included the words dyke*/dike*/wetland/marsh in the captions. Zhao et al. used a ‘big data’ text mining approach, extracting and associating bi-grams (two-word strings) from geolocated post captions to particular cultural ecosystem services (CES), modelling those CES using SolVES and comparing (as with Chen et al.) dykeland and wetland services. Whereas Chen et al. only found direct mentions of freshwater marshes (specifically Miner’s Marsh), in Zhao et al. we leveraged the coordinates to locate those geolocated to tidal wetland sites. This will help us better understand the tradeoffs associated with climate change-driven adaptations of the dykeland system in the Bay of Fundy, the focus of NSERC ResNet Landscape 1.
It is the usual frantic end-of-term time, compounded by COVID uncertainties and some family health issues, but I can’t let March go by without a post. There has been a lot happening worth exclaiming about.
First, ResNet postdoc Lara Cornejo started her fellowship remotely early this month, while she waits for her work permit to be approved. She is starting by working on modelling some of the pollination service delivery in dykelands and tidal wetlands based on fieldwork by Evan and Terrell from SMU.
Second, Brooke McWherter, currently a PhD candidate at Purdue University under the wonderful Dr. Zhao Ma, learned that she won a Mitacs Elevate postdoctoral fellowship to come work with me for two years. Her project will start in August, and will follow the new Advanced Grazing Management farmer peer-mentorship program being launched this year by Canadian Forage and Grassland Association and Farmers for Climate Solutions. Huge thanks to the latter for being the official host of this Mitacs. Brooke will unfortunately soon get to experience the work permit uncertainty that Lara is experiencing now.
Third, IDPhD applicant Robin Willcocks Musselman, already an MES alum, learned she won a Nova Scotia Graduate Scholarship to supplement her study on my climax thinking SSHRC this fall. Robin will hopefully be looking longitudinally at experiences of flood displacement along the St. John River, as well as potentially elsewhere, to understand not only place disruption but processes of place adaptation and attachment.
Not bad for a single month. Welcome, Lara, and brava Brooke and Robin!
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