The many Modes of Citizen Science

Abstract

Citizen science is currently heralded by proponents for science and policy in many ways. From a science policy perspective, citizen science is often brought forward as a remedy to 'alternative facts' and to general issues of trust in science and politics. In many cases citizen science has been promoted in sociotechnical imaginaries of creating the 'open society' by democratizing science, facilitating scientific literacy, often via digital technologies and networking (Holocher-Ertl and ZSI, 2013; Nascimento et al., 2014). Here, an imaginary from science policy has emerged, one wherein citizen science is meant to "enable citizens and citizen groups to participate in evidence-based policy and decision-making" (Lamy, 2017:19). However, in contrast to such general accounts, this special issue seeks to unpack citizen science, and instead approach it not as one, but as several different modes of social epistemologies. These diverse modes also instantiate a wide range of imagined epistemic agents; 'the citizen' , 'the volunteer' , 'the participant' , 'the crowd' , 'the activist' , 'the community' et cetera-agents that in one way or another perform scientific research without being a professional scientist. The reasons are as manifold as the identities. Sometimes citizens react to environmental injustice by creating their own instruments and data. Sometimes volunteers join already defined basic science projects and

Analysis of the evolution and collaboration networks of citizen science scientific publications

“…The term was simultaneously introduced in the 1990s by Alan Irwin (Irwin 1995) and Ricky Bonney (see Bonney et al (2009)), and in the last 25 years many other definitions and/or classifications have been proposed and discussed (see for instance, among many other references, (Wiggins and Crowston 2011;Shirk et al 2012;Haklay 2013; Socientize Project 2014; Finquelievich and Fischnaller 2014;Haklay 2015;Pocock et al 2017;Strasser et al 2018;Ceccaroni et al 2019;Heigl et al 2019). This plethora of definitions and classifications (Kasperowski and Kullenberg 2019) makes more appropriate to speak of a continuum (Cooper et al 2007;Pocock et al 2017) or a broad spectrum of citizen science practices.…”

Imagining Citizens as More than Data Subjects

“…There is a diversity of epistemological and ontological meanings of citizen science; see discussion in(Kasperowski and Kullenberg, 2019).5 The visualisations were generated by Francisca Grommé, Ville Takala and Dave Moats. On visualisations, see alsoKarasti et al (2021) 6 This is a point thatCandea (2013) makes in relation to ethnographic fieldsites.Science & Technology Studies XX(X)…”

Science by, with and for citizens: rethinking ‘citizen science’ after the 2011 Fukushima disaster

“…Against this background, "citizen science" does not emerge as a concept of which the definition is shared among various stakeholders, nor as a term that all stakeholders feel comfortable identifying with. Thus, the risk of calling all grassroots movements "citizen science" is that this obscures various historical and cultural manifestations, as well as the historical and cultural background of Japanese or Asian forms of citizen science, how citizens themselves interpret their actions and activities, or do justice to the "many modes of citizen science" (Kasperowski and Kullenberg, 2019), which abound. Ideally, citizen science terms and concepts would be developed by, for and with citizens to better reflect the values, priorities, and stakes of its main agents and of all concerned parties.…”