• Login
    View Item 
    •   Home
    • Theses & Dissertations
    • 2022 - Mines Theses & Dissertations
    • View Item
    •   Home
    • Theses & Dissertations
    • 2022 - Mines Theses & Dissertations
    • View Item
    JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it.

    Browse

    All of Mines RepositoryCommunitiesPublication DateAuthorsTitlesSubjectsThis CollectionPublication DateAuthorsTitlesSubjects

    My Account

    Login

    Mines Links

    Arthur Lakes LibraryColorado School of Mines

    Statistics

    Display Statistics

    Theorizing the "social" in sociotechnical, community-based engineering: incorporating a rapid assessment procedure in educational and field-based studies on Colombian artisanal and small-scale gold mining

    • CSV
    • RefMan
    • EndNote
    • BibTex
    • RefWorks
    Thumbnail
    Name:
    Gibson_mines_0052N_12485.pdf
    Embargo:
    2023-11-04
    Size:
    1.602Mb
    Format:
    PDF
    Download
    Author
    Gibson, Casey
    Advisor
    Smith, Jessica, 1980-
    Smits, Kathleen M.
    Date issued
    2022
    Keywords
    anthropology
    humanitarian engineering
    modified ethnography
    socio-hydrology
    transdisciplinary
    water resource sustainability
    
    Metadata
    Show full item record
    URI
    https://hdl.handle.net/11124/15529
    Abstract
    Engineering and scientific fields now widely recognize how crucial it is to understand and incorporate “social” factors to conceptualize complex systems, inform design, and guide projects. However, most engineers and natural scientists are not trained to analyze social factors as comprehensively as technical ones. Thus, the overarching aim of this thesis was to help diverse, technically-minded audiences rethink the “social” dimensions of sociotechnical systems by drawing from established social science, social justice, community-based research, and humanitarian engineering frameworks. Moreover, this thesis sought to ground these theoretical ideals with concrete educational and field-based tools and case studies centered on challenges within the Colombian artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) sector–a rural livelihood with significant environmental, political, technical, and social entanglements. The broad research questions focused on assessing the opportunities and barriers for implementing transdisciplinary tools, as well as analyzing what these tools could reveal about sociotechnical ASGM systems. This thesis includes two cases for different audiences: 1) an educational study for systems engineers in which we taught an anthropological Rapid Assessment Procedure (RAP) to students to help them conduct front-end stakeholder needs analysis with ASGM community members; 2) a field-based study for socio-hydrologists in which we applied RAP in an ASGM community to characterize the qualitative mechanisms driving coupled human-water systems. In both studies, we contributed to ongoing theoretical discussions on the current limits and opportunities for enhancing “social” aspects of transdisciplinary work by synthesizing literature from humanitarian engineering and social science. In the applied portions of this thesis, we found that RAP was a helpful tool in both educational and field-based settings. In the RAP workshop, students perceived practical benefits from RAP and demonstrated positive learning outcomes in analyzing ASGM stakeholder needs. In the field in Colombia, RAP allowed us to identify patterns of hydrological-risk-based livelihood decisions in ASGM and agricultural sectors that paradoxically threatened the very water resources that these livelihoods depended on, ultimately revealing critical points of intervention for sustainable water resource management. These findings indicate the need for further theoretical and applied research on how engineering and natural science disciplines can fruitfully collaborate with social science fields to take people more effectively into account in sociotechnical problem definition and solving.
    Rights
    Copyright of the original work is retained by the author.
    Collections
    2022 - Mines Theses & Dissertations

    entitlement

     
    DSpace software (copyright © 2002 - 2023)  DuraSpace
    Quick Guide | Contact Us
    Open Repository is a service operated by 
    Atmire NV
     

    Export search results

    The export option will allow you to export the current search results of the entered query to a file. Different formats are available for download. To export the items, click on the button corresponding with the preferred download format.

    By default, clicking on the export buttons will result in a download of the allowed maximum amount of items.

    To select a subset of the search results, click "Selective Export" button and make a selection of the items you want to export. The amount of items that can be exported at once is similarly restricted as the full export.

    After making a selection, click one of the export format buttons. The amount of items that will be exported is indicated in the bubble next to export format.