#knowledge making

[cognitivejustice]

How citizen science is shaping international conservation

Citizen science can shape policy at every level, from local projects to global initiatives.

Citizen science is a powerful tool for involving more people in research. By influencing policy, it is transforming conservation at global, national and local levels.

Citizen science actively encourages non-scientists to be a part of the scientific research process. Sometimes the terminology gets confusing. We say “non-scientists” but through taking part in citizen science projects, people become scientists – they’re just not professionally involved in the research.

It’s also worth noting that the “citizen” in citizen science is completely unrelated to ideas of national citizenship.

Put simply, it’s science by the people for the people.

Citizen scientists can take part in every stage of the research process. Depending on the project, participants can write the research questions, choose the methods, collect the data, analyse and interpret the results, and share the research as widely as possible. By broadening people’s understanding of scientific problems and solutions, citizen science can act as a powerful catalyst for change.

It is already making an impact across lots of disciplines, including conservation, by addressing barriers to policy change such as lack of evidence and low levels of public engagement and input. While it’s not yet common for citizen science to directly influence policy, in our research we’ve seen how citizen science can shape policy at every scale: through promoting policy, monitoring progress towards policy or advocating for policy enforcement.

At a local level, citizen science can influence policy and transform conservation science. The clean air coalition of western New York is a group of citizens concerned about smells and smoke, and their connection to chronic health problems in the community. The group collected samples in 2004 to determine what was in the air and presented this data to the New York Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) and the US Environmental Protection Agency.

[queerephemeralities]

Insubordinate Spaces, 35

As a pedagogical, epistemological, and political practice inside insubordinate spaces, improvisation opens doors to a way of life grounded in the promotion of possibility. It is a device for turning passive victims of circumstance into active agents of emancipation and a form of alchemy that transforms poison into medicine and humiliation in to honor. ... Improvisation creates new options by revealing possibilities that already exist but have gone unrecognized (Hirmer and Jackson 2016).

[ryantannerread]

A similar distinction-making role is played by understandings that science is discovered rather than made. We have always known that making scientific knowledge involves things like the construction and plying of instruments, the mobilization and evaluation of testimony, the making of textual and visual representations, and the persuasive techniques used in winning credibility for claims made. What we have not always appreciated is the historical interest of such things, that all these things, and many more aspects of mundane practice, constitute the human and material stuff out of which scientific knowledge is produced, and that they themselves work to secure the idea of scientific knowledge as discovered rather than invented

Steven Shapin, Never Pure, page 57.