We are pleased to present this symposium featuring commentary from participants in the “Critical Studies of Citizen Science in Biomedical Research” conference held on the March 2, 2017, at King’s College London. Organized by different projects concerned with citizen science in Kiel (A. Buyx) & London (B. Prainsack), Exeter (S. Leonelli), and Geneva (B. Strasser), the event took a critical look at the role of citizen science in biomedical research in the 21st Century. Presenters from the event give us a peek into their work in the forthcoming posts, which will appear daily.
By Barbara Prainsack, Alena Buyx, and Amelia Fiske
As many of our teachers have told us, and as we have repeated told to our students: if you have to insist that you are engaging in a “critical” analysis, then something is wrong. We should be able to assume that as social scientists, ethicists, or scholars more generally we always take a critical distance to our materials. So why did we call a meeting on citizen science in biomedicine “critical studies of”?
The reason was one of emphasis: we wanted to bring together people who were not merely cheerleaders for citizen science, offering analyses that remove friction points in the name of making citizen science even better (whatever ‘better’ might mean in this respect). Instead, we were looking for work that challenges the very assumptions portraying citizen science as novel and noteworthy, or as something particularly problematic and in need of ethical attention. We did so not because we necessarily disagree with these portrayals, but because we felt that we should pay as much attention to continuities as to discontinuities; to old practices as well as to new ones; and to offline as well as online collaboration in scientific knowledge creation. We felt that only if we explored the values and goals underpinning practices and initiatives that use the label “citizen science” can we approach the questions that matter most to us: How do these practices change the distribution of power between different actors? Who is (dis)empowered by them? Who or what gains visibility, and who or what is obscured? What new patterns of inclusion or exclusion emerge as a result? We have long been interested in the concept of solidarity and its role in biomedicine (see our new book with Cambridge University Press), and we wanted to know if some of the citizen science initiatives could be seen as emerging forms of solidaristic practice. Read More
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