Watershed Citizen Science: Toward Democratic Governance?

• In Event: How Do They Understand the Science? Communicating Science, Risks, and Disasters 2

Abstract

The intimate relationship(s) between bodies, watersheds, and the state is being challenged by innovative citizen science projects. Routine water quality monitoring, once provided by authoritative agencies, has sometimes been eclipsed by the immediate, finer-scale data produced by volunteers and posted on easily-accessible websites.
In this case study of a lake monitoring citizen science project in New York, the social epistemology of watershed citizen science can be interrogated, and its shifting meanings and significance will be unpacked. Using preliminary results from interviews with project participants and community residents, this paper strives to make sense of how people respond to new information that underscores the proximity between their toilets and their taps. Because the testing including pharmaceutical metabolites, caffeine, and sucralose, people’s awareness of incomplete wastewater treatment is heightened, along with the risks associated with drinking water that has become tainted by it. Conceptual shifts emerge from this citizen science initiative in connection with notions of metabolism, the bodies, pristine places, and domestic infrastructure.
While some observers have celebrated citizen science as way to cultivate environmental citizenship, and further democratize governance, others have questioned its capacity to be truly transformative. These monitoring participants are engaged in co-production of data, and the process itself renders the information qualitatively distinct and different than other environmental data. The impacts of both existing projects as well as potential future opportunities will be considered, and the paper argues for the necessity of scale as an analytical category in theorizing environmental citizenship.

Author

• Sharon Moran, SUNY - Environmental Science and Foresty