Citizen Science

This entry describes developments in the field of public understanding of science that led to Alan [Page 130]Irwin's conception of citizen science. Irwin's concept turns the public understanding of science idea on its head and explores science–society issues from the point of view of the citizens and what they consider to be relevant. This idea inspired and influenced a range of formal and informal science and technology communication initiatives and projects, which will be described in the second part.

In the 1980s, there was dissatisfaction among members of the scientific community with how members of the public perceived science. A number of mainly quantitative surveys also determined that the public was not scientifically literate enough to make informed decisions involving science. Another tendency during that time was a growing lack of trust in scientific and technological expertise as a consequence of scientific crises such as the radiation accident of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the former Soviet Union or the scientific uncertainties involved in the outbreak of mad cow disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) in Europe. Many citizens realized that they are highly dependent on scientific and technological experts to assess, calculate, measure, and predict the potential risks and benefits of the implementation of new technologies or particular scientific, technological, medical, or environmental policies.

Members of the population grew increasingly suspicious toward scientific experts since so many of the new risks, hazards, and dangers that affect citizens' lives have had their origins in scientific and technological practices. Various efforts have been made to enlighten the public about science and increase and foster a better public understanding of science. As a consequence, a range of promotional strategies and initiatives were established to better disseminate scientific knowledge and to educate the public about science. The assumption behind these initiatives was that a public that was more educated about science would take up more science and would better appreciate the value of science. In this view, there is a divide between educated scientific experts and an ill-educated public that is “ignorant” about science and needs to be educated by the experts. This asymmetric and simplified model of science–society relations that described the public as being deficient in scientific knowledge soon came under attack and was labeled the deficit model of science communication by a range of critics.

Science studies scholars and sociologists that empirically investigated science–society relationships found that in practice things were more difficult and complex. For instance, it was found that some citizens deliberately choose not to take up scientific knowledge for various reasons. All efforts to educate them about science were doomed to fail because they did not see it as their job to deal with scientific questions. From this point of view, it is the task of the expert to deal with scientific and technical issues. Other studies found that the scientific knowledge of the experts was too abstract to be applied to specific and local contexts. In this case, scientific experts did not manage to adapt their expert knowledge to relevant contexts of application because they failed to incorporate the local knowledge of the citizens. In fact, in some cases, the local and situated knowledge of the citizens clashed with the technical knowledge of the experts, and the experts lost their credibility among the citizens because they could not provide solutions that made sense to the locals. Not only did scientists not consider the viewpoints and concerns of citizens as being relevant to their problems, but also nonexpert citizens had problems making sense of the advice they got from the scientific and technical experts.

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