Citizen Science in Deliberative Systems: Participation, Epistemic Injustice, and Civic Empowerment (original) (raw)

Citizens and Collective Deliberation in Social Science

Manuscrito

It is argued that, in certain particular conditions related to the intellectual character of the deliberators and their cognitive diversity, small research teams that engage in deliberation in the analysis of data and involve citizens can better promote good epistemic results than those teams which do not involve citizens. In particular, it is argued that certain communities within the social sciences that lack the relevant cognitive diversity among their professionals can take advantage of the diversity found in the citizenry to increase the epistemic quality of their research, as long as the citizens possess the relevant virtues.

An Epistemology for Democratic Citizen Science

Humanity is currently confronted with a series of profound existential crises. Beneath it all lies a crisis of meaning, of being able to make sense of the world. If we are to overcome this situation, we need robust scientific knowledge of the world and our place within it. However, science is facing a number of serious challenges to meet these needs of society. One reason for this is that science often fails to fulfil the unrealistic expectations it has set itself to meet. Such expectations are generated by an outdated view of knowledge production, which persists among many members of the public and scientists alike. This has led to an ultra-competitive system of academic research, which sacrifices long-term productivity through an excessive obsession with short-term efficiency. Efforts to diversify this system come from a movement called democratic citizen science. Here, we argue that this kind of citizen science can serve as a model for scientific inquiry in general. It requires a...

“Citizen Science”? Rethinking Science and Public Participation

Science & Technology Studies

Since the late twentieth century, “citizen science” has become an increasingly fashionable label for a growing number of participatory research activities. This paper situates the origins and rise of the term “citizen science” and contextualises “citizen science” within the broader history of public participation in science. It analyses critically the current promises — democratisation, education, discoveries — emerging within the “citizen science” discourse and offers a new framework to better understand the diversity of epistemic practices involved in these participatory projects. Finally, it maps a number of historical, political, and social questions for future research in the critical studies of “citizen science”.

The Valuable Plurality of the Citizen Sciences

Science & Technology Studies

Citizen science is a multilayered concept. Although it is generally understood as a form of public engagement with science and technology, it can take various forms, with widely different roles for citizens. Despite this vastness, a “contributory” strand of citizen science dominates the field, which formally limits citizens’ roles to those of data gatherers for professional scientists or experts. This has led critics to argue that citizen science is not as inclusive, socially transformative, or democratizing as its advocates claim, and to appeals by scholars, practitioners, and policymakers for more dialogue and deliberation in all stages of citizen science processes. In this piece, we share our reflections on these questions drawing on our experiences as participant observers in contributory citizen science projects in various parts of the world. Responding to the above critiques, we illustrate how such projects can have emancipatory potential in terms of impacting policy agendas, ...

The Promise of Participation and Decision-Making Power in Citizen Science

Citizen Science: Theory and Practice

Citizen science is challenging professional researchers and their organizations to rethink the way they do science and connect with society. In any citizen science project, professional researchers are "making a promise" to the public about the level of participation and power in decision making that they are willing to provide to citizen scientists. Researchers should set expectations explicitly to ensure informed participation, trust, and motivation. Also, the design of tools for informed consent, information sharing, recognition, and privacy has to be adapted to the new power relations and distributed knowledge production. Based on fieldwork experiences and literature review about environmental and biomedical citizen science, this article examines the challenges and proposes solutions for: 1) setting expectations for informed participation; 2) addressing privacy concerns and adapting informed consent to evolving interests and networked environments; and 3) promoting citizen governance of research data. Citizen science has the potential to both increase scientific literacy and counteract mistrust and skepticism about scientific evidence of global problems (such as climate change) that need to be addressed. However, there are still many challenges to fulfilling the promise of citizen science-for example, empowering people and gaining trust. A few inspiring initiatives help us reflect on a facilitation model for engagement and informed participation; privacy by design; and new governance models for research data provided by citizen scientists.

The many Modes of Citizen Science

Science & Technology Studies, 2018

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

Philosophical Foundations for Citizen Science

Citizen Science: Theory and Practice, 2019

Citizen science is increasingly being recognized as an important approach for gathering data, addressing community needs, and creating fruitful engagement between citizens and professional scientists. Nevertheless, the implementation of citizen science projects can be hampered by a variety of barriers. Some of these are practical (e.g., lack of funding or lack of training for both professional scientists and volunteers), but others are theoretical barriers having to do with concerns about whether citizen science lives up to standards of good scientific practice. These concerns about the overall quality of citizen science are ethically significant, because it is ethically problematic to waste resources on low-quality research, and it is also problematic to denigrate or dismiss research that is of high quality. Scholarship from the philosophy of science is well-placed to address these theoretical barriers, insofar as it is fundamentally concerned about the nature of good scientific inquiry. This paper examines three important concerns: (1) the worry that citizen science is not appropriately hypothesis-driven; (2) the worry that citizen science does not generate sufficiently high-quality data or use sufficiently rigorous methods; and (3) the worry that citizen science is tainted by advocacy and is therefore not sufficiently disinterested. We show that even though some of these concerns may be relevant to specific instances of citizen science, none of these three concerns provides a compelling reason to challenge the overall quality of citizen science in principle.

Rethinking citizen participation in scientific and technical issues

Telos: Revista de Estudios Interdisciplinarios en Ciencias Sociales

The growing complexity of technoscientific issues has posed a challenge to decision-making in our democracies. Over the last two decades, we have thus witnessed a rise in the participatory processes that promise to democratize these issues by including citizens in decision-making. This paper aims to study the discourses and practices of the organizers of participatory processes in Spain to analyze these proposals' limits. In order to accomplish this objective, we conducted eight case studies by interviewing the individuals responsible for these processes and examining publicly available materials related to them. The analysis of the collected data reveals that, although the participation of laypeople is considered a positive contribution, the very configuration of participation—based on a problematic division between experts and non-experts—ends up limiting the ambition of democratizing decision-making. Based on these findings and drawing on lessons from the field of activism, t...

Citizen science: modes of participation and informational activism

In this article, we focus on some empirical Brazilian cases, calling attention to ways of participation and collaboration among scientists involved in these ways of knowing as well as to the challenges resulting from digital mediation in the investigative process. More specifically, the chapter discusses how certain experiences of citizen science are challenged to place scientific practice closer to the borders of political and informational activism. Indirectly, we intend to interrogate the possibilities and the limits for the production of knowledge in the field of human sciences through digital technology: how can we delineate the tenuous border between digital humanities, social engineering, cognitive capitalism and the shaping of a society of control?

“We the Scientists”: a Human Right to Citizen Science

Philosophy & Technology, 2015

The flourishing of citizen science is an exciting phenomenon with the potential to contribute significantly to scientific progress. However, we lack a framework for addressing in a principled and effective manner the pressing ethical questions it raises. We argue that at the core of any such framework must be the human right to science. Moreover, we stress an almost entirely neglected dimension of this right-the entitlement it confers on all human beings to participate in the scientific process in all of its aspects. We then explore three of its key implications for the ethical regulation of citizen science: (a) the positive obligations imposed by the right on the state and other agents to recognize and promote citizen science, (b) the convective nature of the participation in science facilitated by the right and (c) the potential to mobilize the right in rolling back the unprecedented expansion of intellectual property regimes. From Thales of Miletus' geometrical theorems to Benjamin Franklin's lightning rod, the history of science is studded with the contributions of individuals who were not professional scientists in the contemporary sense. These intrepid amateurs made observations, conducted experiments or devised methods of investigation that prompted major advances. By contrast, the professionalization and institutionalization of science did not get into full swing until well into the nineteenth century, and when it did so, it had the effect of crowding non-professionals out of the scientific enterprise. In recent decades, however, there has been a tremendous flowering of non-professional involvement in scientific research. This phenomenon has been dubbed citizen science (Bowser and Shanley 2013). Although the term lacks a precise and widely accepted definition, we take it to mean any form of active non-professional participation in science that goes beyond human subject research conducted by professional researchers. In both scope and format, citizen science traverses the full extent of scientific activity. Projects