Citizen science in Latin America and the Global South, Part 1

“Citizen science” has become, in recent years, an increasingly visible placeholder for various forms of public participation in science – even while the dominant definition of citizen science by scientists themselves is, still, the outsourcing of “genuine” scientific work to non-scientists (Fraisl et al. 2022; Rosas et al. 2022). Indeed, even metastudies reflecting upon the diversity of citizen science initiatives, when led by traditional scientific viewpoints, focus strongly on the “added value” that citizen involvement brings to “science” and reduced definitions of society (Vohland et al. 2021). In contrast, social studies of citizen science have placed significant emphasis on the work of non-scientists working outside – or even against – the interests of institutional science. Such a perspective, in which benefits to science may or may not be the end purpose of citizen science, comprises an array of more politically heterogenous activities, which are “more or less spontaneous, organized and structured, whereby nonexperts become involved, and provide their own input to agenda setting, decision-making, policy forming, and knowledge production processes regarding science” (Bucchi and Neresini 2008, 449). If citizen science is intended to broaden engagement in both the dominant science, but potentially also in counter-narrative and dissenting actions (Moore and Strasser 2022), it faces an ongoing process of redefining or even disassembling the boundaries between what is science and what is not, and between those who are legitimized to do science and those who are not (Eitzel et al. 2017). This is particularly important given how critical analysts of citizen science have pointed out that, while scientist-led citizen science can indeed be a successful form of “distributed cognition” within which non-scientists can still display bounded friction (Kasperowski and Hillman 2018), at another extreme, the term can and has been appropriated to carry out “citizen washing” of industrial propaganda and lobbying (Blacker, Kimura, and Kinchy 2021). Despite the generality of the term, there is nonetheless common ground across all citizen science from an analyst’s perspective. Citizen science, after all, always takes place in specific geopolitical, technical, and epistemic contexts that deeply shape and turn it. It also involves, at least in every paradigmatic case, one of two types of activities: those associated with the collection, classification, and/or analysis of data; or those