Citizen Science and a New Rights Agenda

Citizen science has expanded in the last two decades, gaining visibility in the public policies of different countries and agendas of international organizations. It dialogues with other activities and approaches, such as community science, participatory science, and public engagement in science. Citizen science encompasses various conceptions, practices, methodologies, and topics. It is a polysemic term that allows for different interpretations and definitions depending on who mobilizes it and their motivations, objectives, perspectives, and backgrounds. Therefore, it has a situated character depending on local contexts and conditions. It can start either as a scientific project seeking social contributions or as a group or community initiative that may seek support or certification from scientific teams.

The pragmatic and democratic perspectives

It is worth asking from the outset: “Citizen science: for what, for whom, and, above all, under what conditions?” We can observe two major perspectives of citizen science projects, which are not necessarily opposed: they can be complementary.

On the one hand, from a more pragmatic point of view, citizen science is motivated by mobilizing non-scientists to collect and eventually analyze data to reduce costs and improve the speed and scope of research results. Science increasingly demands large volumes of heterogeneous and territorially dispersed data, which implies that relying solely on scientific teams may not be sufficient in many cases.

On the other hand, citizen science has been called upon to give visibility and recognition to the knowledge and perspectives of different social groups to bring new insights into science and make novel contributions to problem-solving and social innovation. This version expresses a more democratic perspective of citizen science, which requires respecting the slow pace of listening and giving porosity to the dialogue between different types of knowledge. It involves a bottom-up and participatory approach as well as co-production methodologies.

Institutionalization and diversity

One challenge is to ensure the long-term sustainability of citizen science projects, considering the plurality of points of view. On the one hand, this requires that citizen science be acknowledged and rewarded by research evaluation and funding systems. On the other, it is necessary to avoid institutional models that create rigid criteria for what defines a project as citizen science and can inhibit its diversity, openness, and innovativeness. We need to allow for an understanding of this approach to science as a concept and process that are under construction and constantly changing.

Different types of initiatives do not necessarily call themselves citizen science, but they can be understood as part of this field. In Latin America, there is vast accumulated experience in participatory approaches and methodologies in research and education. This is attested to by the pioneering work of the Colombian sociologist Orlando Fals Borda and the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire.

In Brazil, citizen science initiatives have been attracting increasing attention since the end of the first decade of this century. In 2021, the Brazilian Citizen Science Network (RBCC) was created, and today, it brings together more than 400 participants. In April 2022, the citizen science platform Cívis was launched by the Brazilian Institute of Information in Science and Technology (IBICT). Cívis has registered more than 200 citizen science initiatives and projects in Latin America, more than half of which are in Brazil. There are citizen science initiatives that attract people interested in science as a hobby or leisure activity on topics such as bird watching (see Wikiaves); communities affected by socio-environmental disasters that produce data with the support of university teams that help them fight for their rights (see “Que Lama é Essa”: What mud is this?); projects that mobilize citizen science in actions for environmental protection (see Blue Change Initiative) and to protect the quality of marine and coastal environments, among many other examples.

Citizen science as open science

Citizen science is currently part of the open science movement. What is at stake is not merely the quantitative dimension of openness, focused on access, but its qualitative aspect – the kind of knowledge we want to produce, which means openness to a diversity of points of view. This implies that its practices and methods go beyond open access and open data principles and protocols. Considering the unequal positions and hierarchies among the heterogeneity of actors who participate in these initiatives is important. Therefore, open data requires more than FAIR principles, that is, that data be findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. It also involves attention to the CARE principles proposed by Indigenous peoples: collective benefit, authority to control, responsibility, and ethics. It is necessary to adopt, whenever relevant, protocols for prior, free, and informed consent, means for the return of research results to the participants, and tools for the fair and equitable sharing of benefits.

Open infrastructures are also crucial, considering citizen science projects’ growing use of digital tools, such as mobile phone applications, recording, measuring, sensing devices, and digital platforms. While these devices enable increased production and data recording in a decentralized manner, they also pose risks of data extraction and exploitation. This is part of the emerging Platform Economy – or rather Platform Capitalism – threatening data sovereignty, that is, our ability and autonomy to make decisions about the production and use of our data. Such platforms usually have user-friendly interfaces but little transparency about their operating and profitability strategies. The growing use of artificial intelligence creates opportunities but also risks. At the same time, digital exclusion persists, affecting several regions and social groups who remain without adequate access to the Internet and become vulnerable to big tech companies.

These aspects and their respective safeguards must be considered in citizen science projects.

Citizen science in conflictive arenas

It has been argued that we need citizen science to contribute towards tackling the current planetary socio-environmental crisis. However, building a “common future” is not necessarily consensual or peaceful. The causes and consequences of the crisis are unevenly distributed across countries, regions, and social segments. Tackling them often involves divergent and conflicting positions regarding worldviews and development styles. There are disputes, sometimes violent, between environmental protection and nature exploitation forces, particularly in scenarios of high social inequality and political vulnerability. To what extent does the pressure for alternative development styles lead science to be permeable to other values and practices or even motivate paradigmatic shifts in science power structures?

Many point out that Western scientific paradigms have promoted invisibility and created obstacles to developing and recognizing other and more diverse scientific trajectories and types of knowledge that could allow for paths leading to more sustainable development. In this context, a set of counter-hegemonic views concerning knowledge and science has emerged, expressing, in Michel Foucault’s words, a true “insurrection of subjugated knowledges.” They originate from various lines of thought stemming from inspiring social movements – from environmentalism to feminist and queer theories, anti-racist, postcolonial, decolonial, and subaltern studies, the pedagogy of the oppressed, the ecology of knowledge, and the epistemologies of the Global South.

Those who propound such lines of thought have sought to make visible the worldviews and epistemic frameworks of traditional and indigenous peoples, groups at risk and vulnerable populations, socially stigmatized groups, lay expertise or experiential knowledge and peripheral science. The goal is to value their role in confronting the present planetary crisis. They propose promoting what they consider to be cognitive justice, paradigm shifts, and border thinking, among other terms.

A dialogical relationship between science and society to counter disinformation

In these scenarios, the role of citizen science is not limited to filling data gaps to monitor the achievement of sustainable development goals. Citizen science has been led to dialogue with those lines of thought and action, promoting interaction between different onto-epistemic bases – different ways of living and ways of knowing – and making visible knowledge practices with a more balanced connection with the sustainability of life. Citizen science has also been a means for scientific and environmental education, contributing to a more dialogical relationship between science and society. This has gained importance due to disinformation and campaigns discrediting science, such as climate denial and anti-vaccine campaigns, with the spread of fake news and fake science.

Citizen science can be an opportunity to strengthen citizenship, especially for those otherwise excluded from it. The notion of citizenship is reinterpreted, giving centrality to more horizontal relationships between the different actors and spaces of knowledge. Citizen science may offer tools to support data and cognitive activism to expand social influence on territorial management and public policies. This means including a new rights agenda, especially the “right to research”.

This is a crucial issue if we want to promote broad dialogue within and beyond science. Such conversations indicate development from ethics of coexistence between different epistemological matrices towards a perspective of polyphony, of communication in its original etymological sense of “becoming common.”

Sarita Albagli, Brazilian Institute of Information in Science and Technology (IBICT) and Institute of Citizen Science, Brazil <sarita@ibict.br>