Abstract
Is public engagement with science an effective response to threats against science? One form of public engagement—citizen science—might be especially useful for addressing issues of inequality that threaten public support for science. Citizen science is both public participation in the scientific process and public participation in the governance of science. In principle, citizen science empowers marginalized communities to participate in the scientific process, using the authority of science to challenge government, industry, or other institutions that exploit imbalances of social power. In practice, however, citizen science can also be used to redirect attention away from actions that address inequalities and to reinforce modes of knowledge production that exclude alternative ways of knowing relevant to those without social power. Thus, rhetoric about citizen science as a solution to threats against science needs to be tempered with attention to specific contexts and opportunities.
“Public engagement” is often presented as a response to threats against science (House of Lords 2000). Some defenders of science equate public engagement with better presentation of scientific information to generate “science literacy” and better public appreciation of the benefits that science provides to society. Others who are more critical of science’s claim to universal, objective knowledge also encourage public engagement, arguing that involving more people in governance and practice of science will strengthen it against its own limitations (Weingart, Joubert, and Connoway 2021). One particular form of public engagement that brings together both senses of public engagement is citizen science, in which nonscientists participate in various aspects of the scientific process. Citizen science is lauded for the opportunities it offers to learn science as well as the ways it can contribute to a more democratically governed science and society (Irwin 1995; Pandya and Dibner 2018). For example, for more than 15 years, projects such as eBird and others associated with ecology and biodiversity have demonstrated the ability of citizen science to improve science knowledge and attitudes among participants (Brossard, Lewenstein, and Bonney 2005; Phillips et al. 2019). Environmental justice advocates have promoted various projects involving water or air quality for their ability to give power to marginalized communities (Ottinger 2017a; Ottinger and Sarantschin 2017).
Yet citizen science, like other forms of public engagement, involves inequality, which threatens science in multiple ways. People with unequal access to science are less able to draw on its reliable knowledge as they seek to address the challenges they face as individuals or as members of social groups. In addition, inequality limits the perspectives brought into the process of producing reliable knowledge, thus limiting the understandings of the world that science produces. Put another way, addressing inequality is not just a moral good, but an epistemological good. For example, using navigational and plant knowledge developed through traditional knowledge systems has led to new understandings of ocean currents and of effective medical treatments (Mazzocchi 2006). Studies have shown that Native Americans and European Americans describe nature differently, with European Americans seeing it as external to themselves, while Native Americans describe themselves as part of nature (Medin and Bang 2014).
The challenges of inequality that citizen science faces range from the mundane, such as barriers of access presented by language or cost (Márquez and Porras 2020), to the structural, such as sponsorship of citizen science activities by established institutions poorly placed for challenging social inequality (Dawson 2019) or by corporations and others actively seeking to undermine social critique (Blacker, Kimura, and Kinchy 2021). But some of the challenges are even deeper, based in the conflicting understandings of what terms like public engagement or citizen science mean. Ultimately, I argue in this article, tools of public engagement and citizen science, promoted for their ability to address inequalities that threaten science, can themselves further those very inequalities.
What Is Public Engagement?
Many discussions about “public engagement in science” speak of it as something good for science, good for society, and good for the people involved (House of Lords 2000). But public engagement involves social power (Lewenstein 2020), and, therefore, some people or groups can be losers while others are winners. For example, when “deliberative process and citizen action” led New York State to ban hydrofracking in 2014, industry groups and investors lost out while environmental activists won (Kollipara 2014).
Part of the challenge is the multiple meanings of public engagement. The term can refer to (1) educational engagement, (2) institutional engagement, (3) participatory democracy, and (4) citizen science (Lewenstein 2012). While links between these ideas exist (Feinstein 2015), most practitioners and even many scholars are unaware of those links. Citizen science in particular has become a major area of theory and practice in recent years.
Citizen Science
Citizen science can refer to at least three broad areas: participation of working scientists in civic issues (e.g., Beckwith 2002; Schneider 2000), participatory democracy involving science (Irwin 1995), and public participation in research (Bonney 1996). The first type of citizen science, often involving elite scientists working with policy-makers at the federal level, does little to address issues of inequality. But the other two types are often described with rhetoric emphasizing their ability to enlist nonscientists in addressing social issues, in the hope of democratizing the relationship between expertise and governance.
As the dates of the Irwin and Bonney publications in the previous paragraph suggest, these latter two meanings of citizen science emerged at about the same time, yet for radically different purposes. Irwin is a sociologist concerned with the relation among citizens, experts, and sustainable development in democratic systems. He used the term citizen science to describe ways that sustainable development could be enhanced if more authority were to be exercised by actors beyond the scientific elite. He acknowledged the value of scientific expertise, but also the limits of scientific knowledge in addressing broad social problems. His work defined citizen science as a form of participatory democracy. Bonney is a scientist concerned about recruiting a large number of observers to support the work of professional scientists and conservation managers. Not knowing of other instances, he coined the term citizen science while writing a proposal that sought to increase the educational engagement of the volunteer observers (Bonney 2021).
Bonney’s definition is the more common one, with citizen science widely understood as a method of engaging nonscientists in the conduct of scientific work. For example, a 2018 U.S. National Academy of Sciences report defined citizen science projects as “those that typically involve nonscientists (i.e., people who are not professionally trained in project-relevant disciplines) in the processes, methods, and standards of research, with the intended goal of advancing scientific knowledge or application” (Pandya and Dibner 2018, 13).
Although over time the definitions have moved toward one another, especially as scientifically oriented environmental monitoring projects have been tied to political change (Cooper and Lewenstein 2016), confusion and concern about competing meanings continue. In 2017, a group of twenty-three authors from eleven countries collated the variety of ways that the term is used (Eitzel et al. 2017). More recently, another international collaborative has proposed substituting “tracking science,” seeking explicitly to challenge complications caused by the use of “citizen” and to honor the types of science often found in communities outside modern organized scientific institutions (Liebenberg et al. 2021). Multiple attempts have been made to create typologies of citizen science projects (see Pandya and Dibner [2018] for an introduction); one of the most common distinguishes between contributory (largely driven by scientists, with volunteers providing data), collaborative (led by scientists with substantial public input into design, analysis, and dissemination), and co-created (created in partnerships with public participants playing leading roles) (Shirk et al. 2012).
An important dimension of citizen science is “public participation in scientific research” or PPSR (Bonney et al. 2009). Although PPSR focuses on the detailed participation of nonscientists in the day-to-day process of research, the use of PPSR for projects such as monitoring of air and water pollution (Ottinger and Sarantschin 2017; Yearley et al. 2003) as a tool for addressing inequalities suggests that hard lines between the different meanings of citizen science are difficult to sustain (Cooper and Lewenstein 2016).
PPSR is important in part because it emphasizes the production of reliable knowledge. Some proponents of citizen science, for example, argue that to deserve the label, the project must produce the kind of knowledge that can be captured in a traditional peer-reviewed scientific publication. Projects that involve only gathering data, but not collating and analyzing that data, do not count as science, according to this argument. A middle ground includes projects that create reports about local conditions or are used to influence policy but that do not lead to fully generalizable knowledge (Bonney et al. 2016, 2014).
Citizen science is often accompanied by rhetoric celebrating its benefits. Just a few examples: “Only then can citizen science realise its true potential to empower citizens to take ownership of their own science education and learning” (Roche et al. 2020). Citizen science “may have the greatest potential to achieve a wide range of public understanding impacts. . . . Many [citizen science] projects intertwine engagement in the science process with the goals of public engagement in governance and science-based decision-making” (Bonney et al. 2016, 8). I have myself argued that “perhaps the most dramatic development in science communication in the last generation is the rise of citizen science” (Lewenstein 2016).
But despite the enthusiasm for citizen science as a form of public engagement, citizen science faces several challenges in addressing inequality in science.
Challenges of inclusion
Citizen science is often promoted as a way to involve more people in science, especially people from traditionally marginalized communities (Wünsche and Schimmler 2019). Many citizen science projects emerge around environmental justice issues and have the potential to work with communities that have had little access to social power and authority. Some of the most prominent citizen projects involve air pollution in marginalized communities (Gonzalez et al. 2011; Ottinger 2016), water pollution in worker communities tied to industrial hog farming, and famously the lead-contaminated water of Flint, Michigan (Pauli 2019; Lewis and Sadler 2021). Many other projects are designed explicitly to reach diverse audiences, and evidence suggests that these projects succeed in engaging many people from marginalized communities in science (e.g., Howlett et al. 2021; Purcell, Garibay, and Dickinson 2012). Citizen science has also been used in communities where literacy itself may be limited, such as the Congo Basin rainforest. A team of geographers combined principles of Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D), participatory rural appraisal, participatory action research, and participatory geographic information systems to create citizen science tools for mobile phones that communities could help to design and then use for purposes identified by the communities (Stevens et al. 2014).
Nonetheless, most data suggest that citizen science projects face substantial challenges of inclusion (Paleco et al. 2021). Insofar as anything connected with science lacks diversity, it contributes to cynicism and distrust of science. And although some projects do succeed in improving diversity, the overall demographics of citizen science participants continue to represent empowered people. In a recent survey in the United Kingdom, for example, Pateman, Dyke, and West (2021, 1) showed that “men were more likely to participate than women . . . white[s] were more likely to participate than . . . minorit[ities] and . . . participation by women from minority ethnic groups was particularly low.” Higher socioeconomic status and more education also correlated with more participation.
Similar results have been found in the United States and elsewhere (Pandya and Dibner 2018, Appendix A). In a detailed analysis of contributions to sixty-three projects on the Zooniverse platform, Spiers et al. (2019) showed that achieving strong science outcomes was correlated with less diverse participant populations. “These observations illustrate the tension that can exist between designing a citizen science project for scientific efficiency versus designing for social inclusivity,” Spiers and colleagues wrote. They argued that this tension exists precisely “from the liminal nature of citizen science between research and engagement” (Spiers et al. 2019, 21).
Language also poses a challenge for inclusion. Márquez and Porras (2020) have argued that “the predominant use of English in science contributes to the widening of social and scientific inequities worldwide.” First, of course, is the lack of access to scientific information for non–English speakers. But in addition, they argue, in many countries where English is not the first language, only well-educated elites are likely to learn enough English to draw on scientific publications. This reinforces the existing inequalities in those countries, exemplifying the Matthew effect, in which those who have resources are more likely to gain more resources.
Although citizen science projects do exist in many languages, the overwhelming majority of them appear to be in English. In the process of preparing this article, I examined Zooniverse.org, SciStarter.org, and CitizenScience.gov, major platforms available in the United States collating citizen science projects. None had a mechanism for filtering those projects by language, and queries to platform staff led only to personal knowledge of projects in languages other than English, not to any systematic way of finding them. Searching a report from the European Citizen Science Association of its May 2020 conference found only five references to “language,” and only one of those references involved questions of translation or access (Woodward et al. 2021).
Why do these challenges of diversity persist? Pandya (2012) identified a range of interconnected issues. Some operate at the individual or family level, such as the lack of family resources of money or time to engage in citizen science. But others are linked to broader structural issues. For example, the concentration of marginalized populations in urban settings means they might not have access to the natural areas where much citizen science takes place. Many science institutions (such as museums, nature centers, or universities) that sponsor citizen science projects might have cultures and norms that are “unfamiliar or even unwelcoming to members of diverse communities” (Pandya 2012, 314).
Because of these challenges, issues addressed by citizen science may be those of interest to the whiter, wealthier, higher-status communities that participate. For example, when Blake, Rhanor, and Pajic (2020) examined participants in an Illinois-based environmental monitoring program, they found both that the participants were “disproportionately white, highly educated, and affluent compared with the Illinois general population”; and that the monitored sites “tend to be located in areas of lower environmental justice concern, and that areas of high environmental justice concern are underrepresented.” Haklay (2016) has also argued that unequal participation in “volunteer geographic information” projects leads to systemic failures in the data that undermine the value of the projects.
At a more fundamental level, as Pandya (2012) argued, marginalized groups may feel that citizen science does not address “pressing community priorities or align with community values.” Pandya said that “scientific approaches can be regarded as incomplete and reductionist . . . in a way that contrasts with more integrative indigenous world views, or as divorced from social and ethical considerations.” He also pointed to historical memories within communities that lead to distrust of science, such as the linking of geology to extractive and destructive mining on indigenous lands.
These challenges highlight problems associated with the label citizen science. Another problem is the very idea of “citizen.” Projects may transcend national borders (such as the astronomical classification projects on the Zooniverse platform). For projects that are clearly place based, many participants may not be citizens of the countries where the projects take place (for example, birders on vacation expeditions). Even more troubling for use of the label citizen, some participants may be explicitly unwanted or “undocumented” workers, such as the migrant and immigrant workers harvesting salal (a shrub used for floral greenery) studied by Ballard and Huntsinger (2006). One can ask, What is a citizen scientist a citizen of?
But alternative labels do not necessarily help. Community science, for example, is sometimes equated with citizen science, especially when discussing co-created projects that emerge from community concerns and therefore address some of the issues above. However, several prominent citizen science researchers and practitioners have recently argued that the terms should not be equated, precisely because “it is clear that citizen science is typically not truly an egalitarian variant of science, open and available to all members of society, particularly those underrepresented in the scientific enterprise” (Cooper et al. 2021).
Balancing benefits and challenges
Although the ability of citizen science to produce reliable scientific knowledge has been well demonstrated (Shirk and Bonney 2018), recent work has pointed to potentially detrimental effects of citizen science. In a review of more than five hundred publications about citizen participation in water sciences, Walker, Smigaj, and Tani (2021) identified a range of problems, from detrimental impacts on individual livelihoods, to disempowerment, to the effects on motivation when projects lead nowhere. The livelihood impacts included the waste of time of volunteers in poorly designed or ineffective projects, the health and safety implications of limited training (for example, the risk of drowning while working around rushing water), and in some cases decreased self-reliance as volunteers turned to “experts” for support. The disempowerment came from being excluded from decision-making and from overreliance on technology to gather data or make observations. Finally, the detrimental impact on motivation was led by the fact that many projects are in fact time consuming, boring, and difficult. Doing science is hard, and if participants become discouraged, the overall impact is negative. Even for those participants who do persevere, many projects have little or no immediate impact (or even long-term impact), leading participants to question the value of their contribution.
These issues lead to challenges of trust. Recent work seeking to identify the dimensions of trust has emphasized how critical openness, competency, and integrity are to developing trust in science (Besley, Lee, and Pressgrove 2021; Southwell et al. 2021). Concerns about the benefits of citizen science may lead to loss of trust if participants believe that scientists do not recognize the many dimensions of the participant experience or are not transparent in describing the risks of participation or the likely outcomes.
Challenges to the social order
A more complex set of impacts of citizen science move beyond simply balancing benefits and challenges. Rather, they highlight the role of social power in defining what counts as a benefit. These impacts suggest that even defining what counts as a threat to science may be the result of various kinds of inequalities.
The case of water contamination in Flint, Michigan, for example, reveals the social power tensions inherent in relationships between communities and the scientific community (Pauli 2019). In 2014, the water supply in Flint was switched to a system without adequate controls, leading to lead contamination that was soon recognized by residents. In 2015, local physician Mona Hanna-Attisha led a study documenting the problem. In addition, some residents arranged for well-known water researcher Marc Edwards (a tenured professor at Virgina Tech and a MacArthur “genius” award winner) to create a citizen science project collecting water samples and providing analyses of the presence of lead. Government officials, however, denied the existence of a serious problem. Well-established community organizations began to fight government inaction, and by 2016 the crisis was nationally known, with states of emergency declared by the State of Michigan and the U.S. federal government. Remediation efforts took place over the next few years. In addition, multiple lawsuits and criminal charges (including involuntary manslaughter) were filed against government officials. By 2020, settlements of more than $600 million had been awarded.
In many early descriptions of the situation in Flint, Edwards was presented as the hero, the scientist riding to the rescue. But those descriptions missed the existing community structures that were actively fighting to improve the water system, as well as to address underlying social inequalities that had allowed the crisis to develop in the first place (Hohn 2016; Lewis and Sadler 2021; Markowitz and Rosner 2016; Pauli 2019). Leaders of those communities already knew what the problem was; they knew what political levers to pull. They also knew that the social and epistemic authority of science would be a useful tool as they sought response and redress from government agencies (Pauli 2019, 179–80). They chose to bring in the scientists, not to “solve” the problem, but to add to the arsenal of tools used to address a complex sociotechnical ensemble (Lewis and Sadler 2021). When the scientists claimed credit, disputes and even lawsuits emerged among the participants—a complex competition for power (Pauli 2019).
The Flint case is not unique. Citizen science can be a tool for deflecting challenges to the existing social order. Social power is embedded in the very design and operation of many citizen science projects, and frequently, the rhetoric of citizen science as a democratizing force in science runs counter to its actual practice.
For example, in work on hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”), Kinchy, Parks, and Jalbert (2016) argue that asking volunteers to take on the work of monitoring water quality has both immediate and deep epistemological effects. In the short term, having volunteers collect “baseline” data to help in later identifying whether fracking has caused damage redirects their concern away from corporate disregard for environmental damage and pursuing immediate political action (for example, to ban fracking). Thus, the water monitoring projects can reinforce the power of corporations to continue their actions in the face of citizen objections. This analysis is akin to the “decreased self-reliance” identified by Walker, Smigaj, and Tani (2021, 16), who found that once funding disappeared for a particular project, volunteers no longer had the resources to pursue the activist goals that motivated them initially.
In the longer term, Kinchy, Parks, and Jalbert (2016) say, the projects also have a deep epistemological effect that reinforces regulatory logics over alternative ways of knowing. By focusing on the type of data that regulatory agencies expect, water monitoring projects reinforce a bureaucratized, regulatory approach to defining “watershed health.” Attention is directed away from “alternative forms of knowledge about watershed health[:] The expansive knowledge of the people who live, work, and play in these places—the kinds of social and experiential knowledge shared in private conversations and interviews, but otherwise rarely documented—is treated as irrelevant to debate and decision-making about watershed” (Kinchy, Parks, and Jalbert 2016, 107). Citizen science projects shift responsibility away from governments and onto populations unprepared for them (Ottinger 2017b; Walker, Smigaj, and Tani 2021).
A 2018 workshop on citizen science and the food system also demonstrated how “large corporations [that] have significant power over the norms and practices of food production, distribution, and consumption” can undermine the democratizing goals of citizen science, according to Kimura and Kinchy (2020). They argue that “the pursuit of ‘food justice’ through [citizen science] requires diligent attention to these power asymmetries and concerted efforts to redistribute power” (p. 1). Similarly, Ottinger (2017a) argues that crowdsourcing to create new knowledge about, for example, the local effects of petrochemicals requires substantial investment of resources—and even then, it will be successful only if the questions align with preexisting scientific frameworks.
In a more recent paper, Blacker, Kimura, and Kinchy (2021) showed how corporate interests have used what they call “public relations citizen science” to deflect attention away from environmental harm, thus improving their public image. The corporate interests achieve these goals in several ways: by attaching a “‘sustainable’ image to a polluting industry, without changing its core practices,” by designing projects in ways that direct attention away from the particular problems caused by the industry’s practices or products, and by emphasizing “rational” approaches to industry instead of “emotional” or “ideological” perspectives (Blacker, Kimura, and Kinchy 2021, 1). The key point is that corporations, which already have substantial economic power, use the forms of citizen science to reinforce and add to that power. These acts counter the “democratizing” ideals often associated with citizen science.
Conclusion
Citizen science combines participatory democracy and public engagement in research: in principle, then, it offers many opportunities for redressing inequalities that threaten the authority of science to address social issues. By bringing more diverse communities into science, by posing questions of interest to marginalized communities, and by gathering data across wider expanses of place and time, citizen science can bring new perspectives to the building of reliable knowledge. Many citizen science programs do achieve these goals. However, citizen science also often fails to achieve many of its equalizing goals, especially in the recruitment of more diverse populations. In addition, certain features of citizen science, especially its alignment with traditional scientific institutions and values, might be fundamentally incompatible with the need to acknowledge alternative epistemologies that drive the concerns of many marginalized groups.
Thus, while citizen science may help to address threats to science, it might also reinforce some of the inequalities that lead marginalized communities to question science.
Footnotes
Bruce V. Lewenstein is a professor of science communication at Cornell University in the Departments of Communication and of Science & Technology Studies. Trained as a historian of science, he works across the field of public communication of science and technology, including informal science education, citizen science, and communication training for scientists.