Jacqueline Hettel Tidwell
The University of Georgia, English, Department Member
- I am Principal Investigator and Director of the Social Energy Atlas at the University of Georgia--a project funded by the U.S. Department of Energy SunShot Initiative. Although originally trained in the humanities, my research and expertise are primarily focused in technical communication, community engagement, and public relations--especially as it relates to innovation and design thinking in both the corporate a... moreI am Principal Investigator and Director of the Social Energy Atlas at the University of Georgia--a project funded by the U.S. Department of Energy SunShot Initiative. Although originally trained in the humanities, my research and expertise are primarily focused in technical communication, community engagement, and public relations--especially as it relates to innovation and design thinking in both the corporate and rural settings. I received my Ph.D. in English from the University of Georgia and a Graduate Certificate in Business Innovation and Design Thinking from the Ignite Program at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.edit
Despite a global push in the development and implementation of widespread alternative energy use, significant disparities exist across given nation-states. These disparities reflect both technical and economic factors, as well as the... more
Despite a global push in the development and implementation of widespread alternative energy use, significant disparities exist across given nation-states. These disparities reflect both technical and economic factors, as well as the social, political, and ecological gaps between how communities see energy development and national/global policy goals. Known as the " local-national gap " , many nations struggle with fostering meaningful conversations about the role of alternative energy technologies within communities. Mitigation of this problem first requires understanding the distribution of existing alternative energy technologies at the local level of policymaking. To address the limitation of existing adoption trend analysis at the scale of local governance (e.g., county governments), this paper demonstrates a novel method for contextualizing solar technology adoption by using the State of Georgia in the United States as an exemplar. Leveraging existing work on the Gini Coefficient as a metric for measuring energy inequity, we argue these tools can be applied to analyze where gaps exist in ongoing solar adoption trends. As we demonstrate, communities that adopt solar tend to be concentrated in a few counties, indicating existing conversations are limited to a circumscribed set of social networks. This information and the model we demonstrate can enable focused qualitative analyses of existing solar trends, not only among high-adoption areas but within communities where little to no adoption has occurred.
Research Interests:
Sociotechnical imaginaries emerged in the last decade as a potentially fruitful approach to understanding how collective social values inflect on the production of scientific knowledge and the design of technological systems. Yet insights... more
Sociotechnical imaginaries emerged in the last decade as a potentially fruitful approach to understanding how collective social values inflect on the production of scientific knowledge and the design of technological systems. Yet insights generated to date have focused on the categories experts use to define a society’s idealized organization, either as the direct subject of analysis by documentary analysis or through the ways such categories circumscribe the field of authorized “values” open for adjudication in public engagement events. We argue that sociotechnical imaginaries require a new methodological framework for designing research in order to examine the collective values of citizens as they live their daily lives, rather than focusing on experts and the state in order to understand the shared moral, material, and scientific goals of a society. Drawing inspiration from rhetoric, corpus linguistics, and dialectology, we present the Social Energy Atlas, a new and burgeoning research project that employs such methods for studying emergent narrative patterns and variation at the local level. Advancing the theory and practice of studying sociotechnical imaginaries is of tremendous benefit to Energy and Social Science researchers, and it is our intent this commentary encourages further careful development and use of the concept.
Research Interests:
Despite a global push in the development and implementation of widespread alternative energy use, significant disparities exist across given nation-states. These disparities, frequently referred to as the local-national gap, reflect both... more
Despite a global push in the development and implementation of widespread alternative energy use, significant disparities exist across given nation-states. These disparities, frequently referred to as the local-national gap, reflect both technical and economic factors, as well as the social, political, and ecological gaps between how communities see energy development and national/global policy goals. This dataset is an attempt to bridge the local-national gap regarding solar PV adoption in the state of Georgia (U.S.A.). This dataset is an aggregation of variables from seven different publicly-available sources that was designed to help researchers interested in the context underlying solar adoption on the local scale of governance (e.g. the county level). The SolarView database includes information necessary for informing policymaking activities such as solar installation information, a historical county zip code directory, county-level census data, housing value indexes, renewable energy incentive totals, PV rooftop suitability percentages, and utility rates. As this is a database from multiple sources, incomplete data entries are noted. Despite a global push in the development and implementation of widespread alternative energy use, significant disparities exist across given nation-states with regard to local adoption. It is becoming increasingly apparent that individual communities do not necessarily share the same energy wants and needs with one another, and as noted in multiple studies of energy development projects [1,2] the alignment of value systems between energy sources and local needs play a significant role in how—if at all—these sources are used [3]. The social and physical distances between where people live their daily lives and where governments define national priorities are a critical, yet only recently-explored, phenomena. A burgeoning area of research, studies of this 'local-national gap,' seek to establish a space for national policy analyses and studies of individual motivations with community-level dynamics. These disparities reflect both technical and economic factors, as well as the social, political, and ecological gaps between how communities see energy development and national/global policy goals. Known as the " local-national gap, " many nations struggle with fostering meaningful conversations about the role of alternative energy technologies within communities. Mitigation of this problem first requires understanding the distribution of existing alternative energy technologies at the local level of policymaking. Moreover, access to datasets that respect these gaps and make clear their strengths and limitations in addressing such issues are not as publicly visible as they are needed to be in order to address such pain points. As described in Tidwell, Tidwell, and Nelson (2018) [4], there is a state within the United States of America that proves to be an interesting case study for investigating issues of local adoption of national renewable energy policy: Georgia. The Energy Information Administration positions Georgia as a leader in biomass energy production and an emerging space for the deployment of