Reference no: EM133204726 , Length: 3 pages.

Assignment: Sleep Deprivation

The Natural Sciences and the Liberal Arts

Theme: "Public and Participatory Science in the 21st Century" Political Ecologies of Citizen Science Project

Introduction

"Citizen Science" broadly refers to public participation in scientific research, typically through on-the-ground data collection. These projects are usually developed and overseen by scientists, who have researched and defined particular environmental problems worthy of study, with citizens collecting the data (Dickinson et al., 2012; Priest, 2013; Wals et al, 2014). In contrast, community-based participatory research involves scientists, social scientists, humanists, and even art-based researchers who work collaboratively with the community through a community-driven (versus expert-driven) project (Pandya, 2014). Sometimes Citizen Science projects are grassroots and community-based and sometimes they are not. As you can imagine, both kinds of projects have strengths and weaknesses but all contribute to our understanding of how science and society interact.

What You'll Do

To begin your work, you need to select an organized Citizen Science effort to join. You can start by browsing any of the following websites, many of which provide search engines to find projects:

1. Zooniverse.
2. "Scientific American's" Citizen Science.
3. Scistarter.

The kinds and frequency of data collection are going to vary by project, but you should plan on collecting data at least once per week for at least 10 weeks if you are making observations in the field, devoting 20-30 minutes/week to data collection. If you are participating in an online project where you watch videos or tag images, you need to spend a minimum of 20-30 minutes per week on your project for at least 10 weeks as well. You need to figure out a good way to track and organize these data right from the beginning. Every project is different, but does it make sense to create tables or graphs? Should you write notes as you make your observations? Some projects will help you keep track of your data but many do not. Therefore, you need to keep track of it yourself the moment you begin data collection.

Everyone in the class needs to post to the Discussion Board forum called "Citizen Science Project Check In" no later than the end of Week #2 to get your project approved.

Your "final product" for this project is going to consist of a written analysis.

Report: (8 to 10 pages in length, not counting visuals or references)

1. Introduction: Introduction and brief background of your Citizen Science effort.

2. Data Presentation and Analysis: Presentation of the data you collected. You need to present your data visually in graphs, tables, charts, or images and provide a thorough written description of the data, including an analysis of what they mean.

3. Project Analysis: Address points #1-4 below; you should have section subheadings for each of the points so your paper is organized as follows ("Citizen Science and Knowing Nature"; "Citizen Science and the Political"; "Citizen Science is Scaled"; "Citizen Science Produces, Applies, and Circulates Scientific Knowledge." In this analysis, please cite 3-5 sources. You can use some of the sources we accessed in class, such as Dickinson et al. (2012), Pandya (2012), and Pauli (2019), as well as any of the sources on the philosophy of science (e.g., the readings on epistemology, feminist epistemology, and Indigenous knowledge).

4. Reflection and Conclusion:

a. What did you learn from this project, both in terms of the scientific data collection process an in terms of the political-ecological analysis you conducted?

b. Do you think that the ways in which this project teaches you to "know nature" are valuable? In what ways might it be limiting?

c. Did this project influence your understanding of and attitude toward the process of producing scientific and environmental knowledge? In what ways?

d. How do you feel about crowd-sourced data? Do you think Citizen Science efforts can impact large-scale environmental issues in meaningful ways?

Political Ecology as a Tool to Do and Think About Citizen Science

In this project we are going to take a "political ecological" approach to understand, unpack, and analyze just what it means to do Citizen Science. While an exhaustive review of what political ecology is and does is clearly outside the scope of this course, we can draw on some key insights from Mara Goldman and Matthew Turner's Introduction to the edited volume, Knowing Nature: Conversations at the Intersection of Political Ecology and Science Studies. Broadly, political ecology studies the politics of environmental change. We've also read (or will read) the work of other political ecologists who study a variety of issues. I've listed these articles/book chapters at the end of this handout for your reference.

The four "big" ideas/questions undergirding your work with this Citizen Science project (drawing on political ecology) are as follows:

1. Political ecologists ask how humans come to know nonhuman nature. So, how does this Citizen Science project teach us about-and how to organize-the world around us? More specifically, how does your project teach you to know nonhuman nature? In our everyday lives and experiences we learn from and "know" nature all of the time-from the food we ingest that our bodies collectively digest with bacteria, to the trees that line sidewalks and cycle CO2 and O2 through the atmosphere in a way that benefits organisms who must respire. A Citizen Science experience requires us to work with our everyday world in a different capacity, by thinking and organizing nonhuman nature differently than our regular experience. How does this work?

Consider:

a. What kinds of data are you collecting?

b. How are you collecting data? (systematic observations (qualitative and quantitative), mapping locations, taking photos, taking quantitative measurements, etc). Be specific and consider citing some of our course readings on this topic.

c. How do the project's foci and data collection process ask you to organize the world? In other words, why pay attention to certain kinds of organisms, phenomena, and data and not others?

d. Are you expected to take an objective or detached perspective as you collect the data? In what ways might your own values influence the research process? Be very specific here and consider some of the course readings on objectivity.

2. Political ecologists ask how the production of knowledge about the environment or nature is always political. So, what kinds of tensions, debates, and conflicts might be associated with this project? While there are many ways to tackle and unpack this question, for the purposes of this class you are going to examine the following:

b. Who started this project and why? (university scientists, the federal government, corporate scientists, community groups)? You may need to email or contact the project in order to ascertain this information-I can help you.

o What do you think their motivations were? Why this subject as opposed to others?

c. Is this project affiliated in some way with other projects?

d. Who funds this project? (volunteers who collect data typically do not get paid; however there are often professionals associated with the project, like directors, working scientists, etc., who do get paid).

o Does funding drive the types of questions that get asked? How?

e. Consider how this project directs funds and resources to one or a few environmental issues/problems and not others.

o Why is it important to think about this?

f. Whose knowledge is privileged in this project? Is yours? In what ways?

g. What happens to the data once you submit them? Who uses them? Why? Is it leveraged in any way to do something practical? Do scientists use the data to publish research?

h. Who or what is the object of study in this project? Why?

i. What debates does this project enter into?

j. Debates about the topic? Debates about Citizen Science?

3. Political ecologists often ask how the production of knowledge about the environment or nature operates through multiple scales, or, aggregate groups of people and their institution, communities, environments, etc. So how is this Citizen Science project scaled?

In this section, you are going to draw on the work you have done thus far in questions #1 and #2. In this context, scaled means that there are many people, living entities, material objects, social structures, and social constructs that collectively make this project. To give you an example, Ottinger (2010) discusses a community-based Citizen Science effort that involved regulatory standards set by the federal (Environmental Protection Agency) and state governments (Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality), community members in a local, grassroots group (St. Bernard Citizens for Environmental Quality), an environmental non-profit group (the Louisiana Bucket Brigade), an ethnographic researcher, bucket air sampler equipment residents used to monitor air quality at local level, mostly invisible air pollutants (chemicals), and a Shell Chemical Facility located within the community (but keep in mind corporations also act at national and multinational levels).

a. Identify the various actors in your project. Describe their role in the project.

b. At what scale are they located (i.e., in terms of global, national, regional, and local scales)? Do participating humans and environments operate at multiple scales?

c. Discuss how they seem to be connected; you may find a diagram or concept map useful here.

4. Political ecologists, especially those interested in the production of scientific knowledge, ask how such knowledge is produced, applied, and circulated. So, in this Citizen Science project, how is scientific knowledge produced, applied, and circulated?

In this section, you are going to draw on your own experiences collecting data, the research you've done so far, and any published documents you can find-these might include scholarly research articles, policy briefs, stories or clips from the web.

a. Who/what produces this knowledge?

b. How does it get "applied?"

c. If the knowledge is "circulated," where does it go?

i. Do scientists use it to publish research that is then used to leverage actual change?
ii. Which stakeholders get to use it and how?
iii. Does it inform or leverage policy in any way?