Authors: Kaan Yildirim, Kelly Achenbach
Reviewers: Karla Avanço, Alessia Smaniotto
On October 19-21, 2023, in Paris, 200+ participants/attendees will gather to discuss Citizen Science and Participatory Research, with a focus on the social sciences and humanities and participatory approaches to research funding, at the Connect.Collaborate.Create. conference. Participants from a variety of interconnected domains will meet there—funders, policy makers, researchers, artists, activists, diverse societal actors, and research infrastructures and services managers. Read on for more insights on citizen science and the significance of this gathering.
Why Citizen Science?
Citizen science establishes a bridge between non-academic society members and academic researchers, blending diverse viewpoints and experiences. This approach allows all parties involved to take an active role in research, from posing questions to evaluating findings. Designing the interaction between “citizens” and professional researchers within a citizen science project is not a process to be taken for granted; Hacklay et al. provide a comprehensive classification of these interactions, highlighting various degrees of public involvement in scientific endeavors (Hacklay et al., 2013). Recognizing the value of an inclusive approach to science, the European Commission advocates and enables this shift through their research and innovation funding programs, which are designed to narrow societal divides and build a robust connection between the public and the scientific world (European Commission, 2020).
COESO: Expanding Citizen Science in the social sciences and humanities
The COESO project (Collaborative Engagement on Societal Issues), led by L’École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), received funding from the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 program to foster the expansion of citizen science within the domain of social sciences and humanities. Collaborating with more than 15 partners from six European countries, COESO has enabled ten pilot citizen science projects that connect social sciences and humanities researchers with stakeholders outside the academic world, and has worked together with these project members to identify and document their needs and the challenges they face.
The interface of citizen science and the social sciences and humanities (SSH) presents a rich landscape of methods, objectives, and interactions, which COESO is exploring and exposing, in order to exemplify how the SSH benefits from and contributes to citizen science and how citizen science benefits from and contributes to the SSH. Through their carefully chosen “use cases,” COESO showcases real-world instances where the collaborative spirit results in meaningful and impactful outcomes.
A glance at three of COESO’s citizen science initiatives in the social sciences and humanities:
LUNCH-BOX-MONITOR: Situated in Belgium, this project addresses universal concerns about children’s nutrition. Beyond gathering data on the nutrient density and environmental sustainability of lunches children bring to school, the project is a collaboration between the esteemed Ghent University, a local primary school, an international NGO, a social enterprise, and a health institution aiming to craft new research methods that are sensitive to societal nuances. This initiative exemplifies the benefit of bringing together diverse stakeholders to help understand and solve a sensitive and critical societal issue.
Playful Futures: Based in Croatia, this venture melds the realms of gaming and environmental awareness. By integrating digital Live Action Role Play (LARP) with ethnographic techniques, the project stimulates discussions with affected community members around rising sea levels in their coastal hometown, and then reflects back to the community about the decision making processes they experienced within the game. As such, the project explores an innovative engagement methodology: using ethnography as a tool for civic participation.
Women Water Watch (wWw): Located in Tanzania, this initiative addresses both water management and gender power imbalance. Researchers at the University of Antwerp work together with Aqua Farms Organisation, a local NGO focused on aquatic resource management, to study how working with the women in the community to co-create awareness raising strategies about water issues and water-borne diseases can trigger behavioral change at the community level and provide input for policy making in the water sector. While many natural science citizen science projects may focus on collecting data on water issues, this project’s research includes an emphasis on studying the resulting behavior and policy changes of the co-creation process, thus illustrating how social sciences initiatives contribute to knowledge building that leads to a more sustainable future.
Citizen science includes a diversity of methodologies that infuse epistemic diversity into modern research by blending the expertise of research professionals with the insights and knowledge held by the public. COESO’s ten use cases in the fields of social sciences and humanities are experimenting with ways to connect academia with the broader community and enhance the reach, the relevance and the impact of research. Read more about them here.
Creating an Infrastructure for Collaboration: VERA (Virtual Environment for Research Activation)
While research collaboration between academic and non-academic stakeholders is recognized as useful and is encouraged through various funding schemes, it is not always easy for the relevant stakeholders to find each other, to find the funding, and to quickly establish a collaborative workspace. Finding each other often happens through chance personal connections, as was the case for the Women Water Watch project described above—a former student of the researchers involved now leads the collaborating NGO. In order to facilitate these critical connections to happen by design, rather than only by chance, the COESO project has created a virtual hub called VERA (Virtual Environment for Research Activation) where different stakeholders interested in researching topics related to the social sciences and humanities can meet, set up virtual workspaces, and share information about their participatory research projects. Through a cooperation with FundIt, VERA also has an integrated funding tool that anyone can use to search for appropriate grant opportunities. Created within the 3-year COESO project, VERA will continue to be developed and maintained as part of the services offered by the OPERAS Research Infrastructure.
Connect.Collaborate.Create.: A Confluence of Thought and Action
October’s conference, “Connect.Collaborate.Create. Bridging Communities for Participatory Research and Citizen Science 2023”, will be a 3-day hub for scholarly discourse and networking for collaborative endeavors within the realms of participatory research and citizen science. Coordinated by European initiatives COESO and PRO-Ethics, the event emphasizes intersections of the social sciences and humanities and underscores the role of participatory methodologies in research funding.
For a comprehensive overview of the conference’s aims, thematic tracks, and collaborative avenues, attendees and those interested are directed to the official conference portal: ccc.sciencesconf.org.
References:
Haklay, M., Dörler, D., Heigl, F., Manzoni, M., Hecker, S., & Vohland, K. (2021). What Is Citizen Science? The Challenges of Definition. In K. Vohland et al. (Eds.), The Science of Citizen Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58278-4_2
European Commission, Directorate-General for Research and Innovation. (2020). Citizen Science: elevating research and innovation through societal engagement. Publications Office of the European Union. https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2777/624713
