Hi everyone,
I am returning here after a long gap. I take advantage of this blank slate to present a more philosophical re-introductory post, so, please forgive and indulge me.
As a part of my quest to reintegrate myself in activities that I used to enjoy, I have joined an institutional panel of citizen science reviewers. My initiation started with a presentation that I watched, an institutional presentation about an institutional effort to promote citizen science, a presentation that involved about six people sitting on the stage and talking. It was informational in nature, and really boring.
This reminded me of a course I attended in my university days, a fun/audit course on the birth and evolution of beatboxing and hiphop. A thesis from that course that I still remember — a movement born on the streetcorner as a resistance to popular institutions and culture, a movement that required nothing more expensive than having a mouth one is born with, what happens when a participant of that movement becomes popular enough to have a show in the Madison Square Garden (for example) for $500 a ticket? Does s/he become the very institution that s/he was resisting?
I remembered that while watching this citizen science presentation. If the universities and institutions take over and mainstream citizen science, will it still be citizen science? And, if that evolution is unavoidable, how do we react to it? Do we resist it or, do we join it and forget about the streetcorners or, do we join it with the motive of creating a bridge between the two streams — the citizens and the science?
Does it even matter? Perhaps not, but I think of this as I join the above-mentioned panel so I can keep my priorities sorted.
P.
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Hola Puneet
Nice to read you again.
Two cents from my hybrid perspective being both inside the university but also on some streetcorners of local environmental struggles.
I think we should leave to citizens set up matters of concern/care and its agenda. Then if academia or institutions can and care about listening they can be powerful allies (not so many labs in street corners).
We are working on a sort of listening/gathering/learning bridge with the Open Agroecology Lab. But I know there are many more examples of this kind. But the bridge should always be open in both ways so we don’t repeat the extractivist path but instead start to infect and transform institutions to build some streetcorners inside them.
Nano
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Estimado Nano,
For the citizen scientist, collaboration with an institution is attractive because it provides access to infrastructure, and possibly even funding. It can also be an avenue for a wider albeit more traditional form of recognition. But, that comes with the danger of being subsumed in a bigger system, and perhaps even losing one’s own identity and motivation.
For the institution, I fail to see anything more than a coat of paint akin to open- or green-washing at its least insidious. And, at the worst end, I see the motivation to use “citizen scientists” really as glorified end nodes in a system that pipes the data and results up the chain to the traditional academic publish-or-perish reward mechanism.
I am happy to see the non-extractive/exploitative goals you have set for your OAL. Hopefully it can become a replicable example. In my current role as a reviewer of institutional citizen science ambitions (an oxymoron if there was one), I hope to keep such a sensitivity front and center.
Gracias por tu dos céntimos que valen más de lo que indican.
Puneet
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