Re-Imagining Citizen Science for Knowledge Justice — A Dialogue

Drawing on the breadth of experience at CS2015 we invite you to join us in a participatory and critical exploration of citizen science in practice. For it to be useful in addressing our urgent ecological and social crises,... [ view full abstract ]

Drawing on the breadth of experience at CS2015 we invite you to join us in a participatory and critical exploration of citizen science in practice. For it to be useful in addressing our urgent ecological and social crises, many of us believe citizen science needs to shed its heritage of scientism. This is the myth that science, especially physical science, is the only source of knowledge.

Scientism emerged as a philosophy at the height of European colonialism in the mid-nineteenth century. Today, some of those undertaking some of the most prominent citizen science initiatives appear to accept one or more of scientism’s three-fold manifesto:

1) All questions, from whatever source, can be answered by physical science;

2) Knowledge claims of physical science are based on a superior mode of reasoning and will therefore always overrule claims based on any other knowledge system;

3) Scientists are uniquely placed to know the right questions to ask, rendering those posed by non-scientists as ultimately meaningless.

We will facilitate an open discussion of how researchers in general, and citizen science practitioners in particular, might be enabled to reject scientism. This will better enable collaborations that embrace the insights, cosmo-visions and enthusiasm of those who have been excluded from having their ways of knowing seen as valid in the past.