Institutions for Civic Technoscience: How Critical Making is Transforming Environmental Research

Wylie, Sara; Jalbert, Kirk; Dosemagen, Shannon; Ratto, Matt

doi:10.1080/01972243.2014.875783

Cited by 104 publications

(70 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…It argues that plans, protocols, and material lists for scientific instruments should be shared, accessible, and able to be replicated" by diverse groups of users, including those not usually counted within science-as-usual, whether they identify as citizen scientists or not Dosemagen et al 2017). Yet, as researchers have shown (and practitioners have experienced), access to and manipulation of scientific tools has been "outlawed by intellectual property" laws (Ashton 2008;Söderberg 2010;Wylie et al 2014). …”

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confidence: 99%

Compromised Agency: The Case of BabyLegs

Liboiron

2017

Engaging STS

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The concept of agency is ubiquitous in STS, particularly regarding cases of alternative ways of knowing and doing science such as civic, citizen, and feminist sciences, among others. Yet the focus on agency often glosses over the constraints placed on agents, particularly within asymmetrical power relations. This article follows the case of BabyLegs, a do-it-yourself monitoring tool for marine microplastic pollution, and the attempt to keep the technology open source within an intellectual property (IP) system set up to privatize it. The tactics used to design BabyLegs as a feminine, silly, doll-tool to discredit the device in the eyes of an IP system that valued traditional gender roles lead to the eventual success of keeping the device open source.Yet, those same tactics also reinforced and reproduced the structures of power and essentialism they were designed to resist. I characterize this technological ambivalence as compromise, and argue that all agency exercised within asymmetrical power relations is compromised. This is not to say resistance is futile, but that agency is never pure, and this recognition lets us be more intentional in how we might compromise as practitioners of diverse scientific knowledges.

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confidence: 99%

Compromised Agency: The Case of BabyLegs

Liboiron

2017

Engaging STS

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“…The mapped imagery had a significantly higher resolution and was more current than existing satellite/aerial imagery [68], [70]. The quality of the resulting aerial imagery was so high that Google integrated it into their own products (the imagery was published in the public domain, requiring no permissions for downloading and republishing) [49], [51], [52].…”

Section: Examples Of Citizen-based Aerial Imagery Mappingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Volunteered Drone Imagery: Challenges and constraints to the development of an open shared image repository

Johnson¹,

Ricker²,

Harrison³

2017

Proceedings of the 50th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (2017)

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“…Building on recent research exploring civic technoscience (Wylie et al 2014), we argue that civic informatics pushes back against regimes of imperceptibility through very practical and highly collaborative data-driven research ! 530 projects.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Civic Informatics of FracTracker Alliance: Working with Communities to Understand the Unconventional Oil and Gas Industry

2017

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Unconventional oil and gas extraction is fueling a wave of resource development often touted as a new era in US energy independence. However, assessing the true costs of extraction is made difficult by the vastness of the industry and lack of regulatory transparency. This paper addresses efforts to fill knowledge gaps taken up by civil society groups, where the resources produced in these efforts are used to make informed critiques of extraction processes and governance. We focus on one civil society organization, called FracTracker Alliance, which works to enhance public understanding by collecting, interpreting, and visualizing oil and gas data in broad partnerships. Drawing on the concepts of civic science, we suggest that the informational practices of civil society research organizations facilitate critical knowledge flows that we term "civic informatics." We offer three case studies illustrating how different characteristics of civic informatics enable public-minded research as well as build capacity for political mobilizations.Finally, we suggest that empirical studies of civic informatics and its facilitators offer insights for the study of "engaged" Science and Technologies Studies (STS) that seek to generate new models of science at the intersection of praxis and theory.

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Institutions for Civic Technoscience: How Critical Making is Transforming Environmental Research

Cited by 104 publications

References 37 publications

Compromised Agency: The Case of BabyLegs

Compromised Agency: The Case of BabyLegs

Volunteered Drone Imagery: Challenges and constraints to the development of an open shared image repository

The Civic Informatics of FracTracker Alliance: Working with Communities to Understand the Unconventional Oil and Gas Industry

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