Reconceptualizing Participation in Ecological Citizen Science: From Straight Lines to Messy Spaces

• In Event: Participation in More-Than-Human Research: By Whom? For Whom?

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to critically attend to the concept of participation in ecological citizen science projects from a more-than-human perspective. Building on a recent thematic mapping of literature on ecological citizen science (Rautio et al., 2022), we continue exploring the questions of participation through further literature review and critical analysis.

Citizen science aims to break the traditional linear or gap model of relationships between research and practice (described in Toomey et al., 2017). As opposed to the view of society as passively delivering problems to experts, who producee objective solutions, citizen science seeks to place scientific research within society and establish a relationship of mutual and productive exchange of knowledge. However, in practice, the linear model persists, which is particularly evident in current theorisations of participation in ecological citizen science.

Participation in ecological citizen science, apart from being seen as primarily for and by humans (i.e. anthropocentric) (Rautio et al., 2022), is also conceptualised as objective and linear, exemplified by calls “to design deliberately so that activities align with, and therefore affect, intended outcomes for sustainability, resilience, and conservation” (Shirk et al., 2012). Nature in these common framings is considered a resource to be carefully managed and conserved. Such conception of participation is based on a deficit understanding of both human participants and nature, who are framed as in need of help by science and what is considered superior scientific knowledge. It has been argued, however, that in actuality, various kinds of knowledge (scientific and non-scientific, human and more-than-human, professional and amateur) and different kinds of being in the world may clash in citizen science projects (e. g. Soanes et al., 2020). Rather than conceptualising these clashes as problems to be solved, we ask: (How) could these clashes be made productive?

To answer this question, we suggest re-conceptualising participation as a messy space where different kinds of “sciences” meet. To do so we turn to diverse approaches that inspire more-than-human scholarship, such as posthumanism and critical animal studies (e.g. Haraway, 2008; Pedersen, 2004; Russell & Spannring, 2019). We disrupt the very possibility of conceptualising participation linearly by seeing science, society and nature as entangled and rendering strict borders between them impossible to draw. We illustrate this by drawing on literature from the field of conservation ecology, specifically the scholarship focusing on eradication programmes on the Galápagos islands (Ruiz-Ballesteros & del Campo Tejedor, 2022; Laso, 2020). We proceed to explore how recognising the agency of other animals and natural environments troubles the habitual dichotomies of participation and, ultimately, blurs the concept of scientific knowledge itself.

What we end up proposing is not a ready-made solution to the issue of participation, but an invitation for ongoing engagement with asking how it would be possible to make space for diverse knowledge in ecological citizen science. This process could result in a profound change in the relationship between science, society and nature, leading to the creation of more just, sustainable and diverse worlds.

Authors

• Marina Pliushchik, University of Oulu
  Presenting Author

• Maria Helena Saari, University of Oulu
  Presenting Author