The colloquium on STS and Citizen Science was organised by Katja Mayer and Claudia Gobel at Vienna University. The workshop brings in the tension between being a researcher and understanding society through STS lenses about knowledge production and the way participatory research develops. The second aspect is the activities of people who are involved in the practice of participatory research. Therefore, working on the boundary between citizen science and STS. There seem to be a lot of interactions between citizen science and STS – the use of STS concepts within CS research and practice for example. There is also involvement of the Zentrum fur Soziale Innovation – ZSI has been involved in citizen science since the Green/White paper on citizen science in Europe over 15 years ago. ZSI continued to contribute and be involved in citizen science projects at the European level and through EU projects such as Socientized to pro-ethics.
The workshop is about Making and Doing CS and STS. Using the ideas of engagement, reflexivity, and How? the concrete practices. Engagement is about reaching out and building relations beyond academic debates, reflexivity and reaching back in and change at home. In concrete practices, we need to think of methods, boundary objects events and so on. Using Downey and Zuiderent-Jerek’s (2017) ideas of making and doing. The concept of making and doing needs to be thought beyond its STS.
The meeting included a set of presentations between different participants. The first talk is from Rina Vijayasundaram, Aarhus University- How to Use Actor-Network Theory to Research Human and Non-Human Actors in Citizen Science-Driven Interventions. Rina is using ANT in citizen science research within industrial research that looks at the quintuple helix on open innovation in Aarhus – public, private, academia, citizens, and environment/nature. ANT is helpful in dealing with the environment. She’s involved in Divaircity which looks at social inclusion for reading air pollution and green urban nexus. She is following a project in its middle and the project focuses on environmental, social and health aspects. Her focus in understanding how citizens are involved with smart city ecosystem and how the environment is presented. One example is about ideas of alternative routes for wheelchair users and cyclists to reduce exposure to air pollution. The input from these users includes discussion about a route but also traffic lights, street furniture etc. They used sensors for assessing air quality between cyclists and wheelchair users, with the ability to compare the routes. The second interaction is to create a green space in the middle of a high-traffic area and set a pocket park to address it. Rina is using ANT and maybe situational Analysis with ethnographical methods – interviews and participatory observation. She’s facing the problem of studying a project while being inside it. ANT can be used to understand various facets of the project and to consider how relationships between devices and measurements, there are inscriptions in which the air “speaks” in the situation. ANT is the way to look at human and non-human actors and how they work – what does it mean to include citizens in the monitoring process, what the sensors are doing, and how air is becoming an actor. Situational mapping – maps all the actors, then you start linking an actor, and then you analyse the discourse that was created in the map.
Yaela Golumbic, The Steinhardt Museum of Natural History, Tel Aviv – talked about Citizen Science, Invasive Species, and Collaborative Discoveries. She will look at invasive species through three different lenses. She explained the concept of invasive species and seeing them as newly introduced species and damaging the functioning of the ecosystem. The costs of managing them is really high so early identification is important. An example in Israel is the Common Myna – originally from India, a very aggressive bird that competes with local birds and takes over nests. The Israeli Bird Count moved from 30th in 2006 to 2013 to 11 and it became the 2nd most visible species. Originally introduced from a zoom. Analysed three specific species – she looked at how new discovery was made, the impact of the platform that was used, and the scientists’ perspectives – part of studying changes in relation to citizen science. Using interviews and other methods. The platforms that are used include iNaturlist which is used in Israel. A researcher was looking through the pictures and saw a species of Afid that had gone through from the Far East and reached Israel. So the researcher shared the experience of the researcher who noticed it and that leads to management plans. The question for the research – she was suspicious of iNat in terms of the people that are doing the ID. The second example is from the museum nature collections – a library of species collections that are in the museum – A green algae was brought to the collection manager and identified as an invasive species – by a volunteer. The collector said that he liked working with citizen scientists and acknowledged that they have knowledge. At the same time the scientist is suspicious of volunteers. The last example is from Facebook, there are so many discussions on different species, with fishermen identifying a new type of fish in 2016 and increase in distribution. The collector is recognising the need to go to where they are (facebook) but it was also a challenge. We see that expertise plays an important play
Karina Maldonado-Mariscal, Technical University Dortmund – Experimentation Spaces for Citizen Science and Social Innovation. She is interested in the issues of social innovation and citizen science. There was resistance to looking at citizen science from the social innovation people. Both literature discuss the importance of experimentation. Participatory approaches, co-creation and living labs are common. There are different aspects of citizen science as a goal to democratising and opening science. The science shops are examples for an experimentation space. Started in the 1970s and allowed for science and society interactions. There are different science shops and they can be university-based or community-based science shops and they work differently. Back the concept of social innovation – broad concept and looking for new forms of organisation, social practices, institutional change etc. Citizen science looks are more virtual spaces in comparison to the physical space in social innovation. The people in social innovation are not familiar to ideas such as science shops and there might be links between the two. The social innovation spaces are talking about different spaces (e.g. Social Enterprise Incubators) but they don’t talk with the science shops. She looked at specific examples of science shops to understand their interactions with social innovation. The challenges include the lack of link between theories and practices – there is a gap and a need for a dialogue and improved links.
Katharina Berr, Weizenbaum Institute, Berlin – Allies of expertise: how citizens defend the epistemic authority of science. Looking if the science controversies. She wants to suggest ways people should engage with people outside the scientific world. She carried out digital ethnography with science fan groups on Facebook. Explore how people preserve scientific expertise (and not challenging). She looked at different groups – the group fights fake news and saying that they don’t want to get into conspiracy theories and argue against them. Things that she worked in STS is the concepts of expertise (eyal Medvets 2023) and Irwins with scientific expertise and on post-truth phenomena. The people do not claim expertise or active be part of scientific knowledge production but to support the scientific enterprise. There is a certain epistemic subordination to scientists. There are different metaphors to outsiders – guests in the house of science, protesters claiming a seat at the table and allies guarding the gates and supporting science. Providing analysis of how people engaged in different forms. There is an issue of reproduction of the powerful public image of science.
Next came my presentation on citizen science and PNS.
Building a Ping Pong Team in an Institute designed for Golf – the case of the Citizen
Science Lab at CWTS, Margaret Gold, CS Lab at Leiden University – explore different aspects of musical chairs. The citizen science lab started with a bottom-up approach in Leiden and that was started by astronomers. The beginning is different locations in the university – astronomy in science, and the astronomers asked for a place to move. Then moved to the open science programme in the rewards and recognition, which was in the policymakers at the executive level. This didn’t work well, and found a new place in the centre of science and technology, in research on research. She found playing ping pong in a place that was set for golf. They are aiming to look at the knowledge agenda – understanding, intervening and practising. There are structural problems – an academic institute that is set for long-term research and slow science, there is some collaboration that is designed for individual research. However, the citizen science is very fluid and doesn’t work. Another aspect is having “skin in the game” a term for investment of having a stake in a business. doing research on research but also making a difference in the world in which you reside – the colleagues want to be valued of the things that they are doing. Work with the external audience is going beyond these aspects. The approach of citizen science is intervening and practising the activities in citizen science – it’s really difficult to get the people who are the scientists into actually joining the effort.
Sophia Segler & Julia Gantenberg, University Bremen- Science and technology studies on critical data analysis and – literacy by and with Citizens in Citizen Sciences – Disapproved (Data) Sciences? exploring literacy by citizens in citizen science. Doing that as in the Ginger project (research society together) researching social cohesion. Very early wanted to engage citizens in the analysis of the data. They used a public data sprint, using data that was provided by EPINetz which allows for the exploration of political information networks with a X/Twitter data set, among other data sets. They applied a Public Data Sprint, inspired by a similar format at the Royal Danish Library in Copenhagen and Aarhus University Library, but this time in case of GINGERs Public Data Sprints collaborating with the digital learning and research plattform EPINetz, which allows for the exploration of political information networks, based on a Twitter API-Dataset. They used that for citizen science – content analysis, time series etc. The participants produced new knowledge and more questions that remained open. Citizen data science appeared in the Gartner hype cycle as a way to carry out work but not in a productive way. There is a need to create ways in which citizens analyse data in a way that is suitable in a way that contributes to them and uses critical thinking. There are different types of analysis – we should think of critical data analysis by and with citizen scientists
Claire Murray, Freelance Scientist and Science Communicator – What does equitable and respectful engagement look like in STS and CS? How to combine voices of the researcher with youth citizen scientists. There is a certain forcing the citizen scientists in their role. There is an issue of design justice and the design justice network principles and Principle 1 of ECSA’s 10. How to frame citizen scientists respectfully and equitably. A project in chemistry: there aren’t projects in pure chemistry in citizen science. Other chemists are sceptical about the ability to do proper science with school students. They made a claim that their participants are scientists regardless if what they are asked to do. There is a question about attaching the value or role to participants. For example, the Seeds project addresses disadvantaged groups and has an issue of the identification of the people who are part of it and how underserved communities are being addressed. There is a way of doing things like calling the participants “Project M scientists” – in a publication. All the names of participants are acknowledged. That impact when talking to the media – got also to include a specific M-scientist that is mentioned by name in a media report about it. In the YouCount project, there was a co-creation of a webinar about youth social scientists – the approach was to include participants in the design of the webinar instead of telling the process about them and it is important to hear the voices of the participants.
Funded by the European Union through the European Union’s Horizon Europe Framework Programmes for Research and Innovation under grant agreement No. 101058509 (ECS project). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
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