2025 Theses Doctoral

Technoscientific Expertise and Local Constructive Knowledge: International Organizations’ Earthquake-Related Initiatives and Their Consequences for Earthen Built Heritage in the Circum-Pacific Ring of Fire

Gasha, Anna

Technoscientific knowledge plays a prominent role in decision-making around built heritage, shaping conceptions and definitions of heritage and influences perceptions of what interventions on heritage are acceptable. On the international scale, the authority of technoscientific expertise both is reinforced by and facilitates the movement of acceptable knowledge across national borders. To date, there has been little scholarly work to address the following questions: Who has the authority to define what constitutes relevant technoscientific knowledge for built heritage? What ways of knowing have been transferred transnationally, and how do they relate to local constructive cultures and heritage?

In response, this dissertation takes a constructivist grounded theory approach to examine how international organizations have coordinated multilateral movements of technoscientific knowledge since the 1960s, particularly focusing on initiatives to address earthquake hazards, disaster risk, and vulnerability. To examine how the organizations faced local contexts and heritage in their projects, I analyze discourses and outcomes that implicate earthen architecture, as a form of local knowledge and built heritage. While recognizing the contributions of technoscientific knowledge and experts to mitigating disaster risks, the dissertation parses the unintended outcomes of such movements of knowledge on local earthen heritage.

With a geographic emphasis on the Pacific Ring of Fire—especially Latin America, Japan, and the United States—the dissertation offers case studies for three groups of organizations: engineering communities of practice (i.e., International Association of Earthquake Engineering and Earthquake Engineering Research Institute); development agencies (i.e., the World Bank and Japan International Cooperation Agency); and international heritage organizations (i.e., UNESCO and International Council on Monuments and Sites).

These actors define what constitutes valid technoscientific knowledge and enforce those categorical boundaries by facilitating the international dissemination of that knowledge. This occurs through vehicles ranging from dispatching experts with the appropriate technoscientific knowledge; international training programs; convenings for knowledge-sharing; influential policies that distill expertise into normative documents; and provision of technoscientific equipment. By reinforcing a selective view of what counts as relevant and valid technoscientific knowledge, these organizations indirectly exclude or minimize of other ways of knowing.

Across the case studies, organizational actors have characterized earthen construction as unscientific and irrational, contrasting it with and privileging what they deem technoscientific. This results in actions and projects that exclude earthen heritage and its knowledge-holders or unintentionally create impediments to the future continuation of local constructive practices, echoing colonial practices of epistemological suppression and cooptation. Thus, despite more recent shifts in the international sphere to valorize local knowledge, a conceptual binary of the modern and scientific vs. the “traditional” and unscientific persists. This raises fundamental questions about the epistemological basis of ongoing efforts and calls to hybridize earthen construction with technoscientific knowledge, and whether these initiatives break down or uphold such categorical boundaries.