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This article explores the changing relationship between the academy and new public formations of scientific research, which we term “civic technoscience.” Civic technoscience leverages tactics seen in critical making communities to question and transform how and who can make credible and actionable knowledge. A comparison of two case studies is used. The first is a grassroots mapping process that allows communities to generate high-quality aerial imagery. The second is an academic-led project using environmental sensors to engage disparate audiences in scientific practice. These two projects were found to differ in their ability to form strategic spaces for community-based science, and suggest pathways to foster more robust relationships across the public–academic divide. By altering power dynamics in material, literary, and social technologies used for scientific research, we argue that civic technoscience enables citizens to question expert knowledge production through critical making tactics, and creates opportunities to generate credible public science.
Notes
See http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/feralrobots
See http://www.publiclab.org, http://www.environmentalhealthclinic.net, and http://genspace.org
Civic technoscience questions and transforms how and who can make credible and actionable scientific knowledge by changing the material technologies used for scientific research (Shapin and Schaffer 1985).
Examples include DIY biospaces such as genspace http://genspace.org and http://diybio.org. There are also organizations focused on improving environmental sensing, such as X-Clinic, http://www.environmentalhealthclinic.net, and Sensemakers, http://sensemake.rs, and individual projects like MIT's Safecast tracking of radiation sensor data, http://blog.safecast.org/worldmap, and University College London's ExCites, http://www.ucl.ac.uk/excites. All of these groups are designing and developing alternative tools for scientific research. With the exception of Public Lab's focus on environmental justice, few of these organizations self-consciously work with traditional environmental justice communities. There is a strong academic lineage of community-based participatory research, however; see Corburn (2005), Brown (1997/2006), Frickel (2004), Morello-Frosch (2005/2006), Ottinger (2011), and Minkler and Wallerstein (2003), much of which focuses on the development of research tools by communities.
Public Lab's founders include Liz Barry, Shannon Dosemagen (author), Adam Griffith, Stewart Long, Jeff Warren, and Sara Wylie (author); the group came together to found Public Lab and apply for a Knight Foundation grant to support the development of an online, open-source public research and development community.
http://www.media.mit.edu/research/groups/1950/grassroots-mapping-balloons-and-kites
Mapknitter.org
This page describes the Creative Commons and CERN open hardware licenses used by Public Lab: http://publiclaboratory.org/licenses
For more on this case see Public Lab research note: http://publiclab.org/wiki/santiago-chile
Public Lab curates maps developed during the occupy protests: http://publiclab.org/wiki/occupy-maps. Stewart Long, a Public Lab co-founder, helped support California based grassroots mapping during the Occupy protests: http://publiclab.org/map/occupy-uc-davis-nov-21-2011/2011-11-21
See also articles by G. Marcus and K. Fortun in Cultural Anthropology's 2012 issue, “Writing Culture at 25.”
This project was sponsored by Eglash's National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded Triple Helix. See http://www.3helix.rpi.edu/?p=2799
See MDL: http://rpi.edu/academics/engineering/mdl
See http://www.rpitechnology.com
See http://www.epa.gov/airscience