Project Confluence

Project Confluence is an effort led by Prof. Darshan Karwat to create a movement of community groups, engineers, scientists, academics, and other professionals to address unmet challenges related to environmental, climate, and energy injustice. The NSF Germination funded aspect of this movement includes three tasks:

Task 1 creates shareable primer resources to better inform academics and community groups on how to collaborate .

Task 2 establishes a digital platform that will:

• facilitate connections between community groups, engineers, scientists, academics, and other professionals

• incubate ideas, projects, and designs

• share knowledge gained and value created through collaborations such that others may succeed in addressing their own environmental, climate, and energy challenges.

Task 3, the central piece of the study, facilitates collaborative technological challenge assessments between four teams of community groups and academics focused on environmental, climate and energy justice challenges. Participant observation, interviews and surveys with team members will answer to what extent these collaborations change the participants' ability to formulate socially impactful research questions. Initial interviews demonstrate the specific ways in which the social relationships within collaborations can contribute to integrating an ethics of care when innovating solutions to environmental, climate and energy justice challenges. Participant observation during periods of consultation between the team members as they struggle to create their projects, has revealed the conceptual change that occurs while they discuss how their different viewpoints and tools can be integrated into a single solution. Thus, the creation of "trading zones", or a means of communicating across disciplines, and the innovation of new language within these zones have become a central focus of the study. The final post-collaboration interviews to be conducted in 2022 will continue to unpack how environmental, climate and energy justice motivates participants in their collaborations and how structures of care may be relevant for understanding this motivation within environmental, climate and energy justice movements.

The ultimate goal of Project Confluence is to uncover a field of praxis that will make concern for solving environmental, climate and energy justice issues a priority in diverse forms of collaboration between community groups and academics.