Through continued research and looking at capstones from previous students I realized something critical: I am already feeling kind of bored with my capstone. I could go through the motions and have a fine capstone about the sustainable development impacts of artificial intelligence in rice agriculture in California and North India. But I can already pretty much guess the outcome. I’m going to see that these technologies are resulting in agriculture that is more resource efficient, results in higher yields, but has potentially negative effects on laborers, at least for the immediate future. And I could certainly go down that route and make things more interesting by expanding on the specifics of the labor dimension, but I feel that it will be a long 7 months if I stick down this road.
Looking at some other Environmental Studies capstones, however, gave me new ideas for how to approach my capstone. One project that stood out for me was Kara Scherer’s capstone from May of this year, Love Thy Neighbor (Or Know Them, At Least): Cultivating Social Capital Online. On the broadest level, Kara’s capstone is about disaster preparedness, but she looks at this problem through the lens of creating effective community support networks and how technology facilitates this process. Her research specifically looks at how individuals in the Palatine Hill neighborhood of Portland use NextDoor, a neighboorhood social media app, in order to create social capital. This is a great example of a research question that provides a unique angle to inform the broader framing question and is a compelling use of scale to situate research.
Currently, my focus question is simply a more situated version of my framing question, but I may be able to create a more engaging capstone if I reposition my research question to find a niche that is unique to me and provides more unexpected results. One possibility would be to look at a variety of new or even future agricultural technologies and analyze what sustainable development values they appeal to for various actors. This would probably be situated in the American West and I could conduct surveys, content analysis, and/or interviews to get at values expressed by various parties. This could be an interesting way to get at what drives people to invest in or implement various technologies. I also find myself more interested in future or even hypothetical technologies than current ones.
Another option that Kara and many other previous capstones took advantage of was using Portland as a situated context. Using Portland would be a simple way to make my capstone more immediately compelling as I have more vested interests in the city and it would be much easier to get in contact with various farmers and business owners to discuss various technologies.
Over the next week, I will have to spend some good time thinking about my capstone and what exactly I want to do. Further research will also be needed to narrow down my options.