Any views expressed within media held on this service are those of the contributors, should not be taken as approved or endorsed by the University, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the University in respect of any particular issue.

Edinburgh Open Research

Edinburgh Open Research

Publishing regular news and updates on Open Research work from across the University

An interview with Eugénia Rodrigues

Our roving reporter Pauline Ward interviewed Dr Rodrigues about her work on Citizen Science.  

Portrait photograph of Eugenia

Q: Could you introduce yourself to the readers?  

My name is Eugénia Rodrigues. I am a social scientist. I trained as a sociologist all the way through my undergrad through to PhD. I work in STIS, the Science, Technology and Innovation Studies subject area, located in the School of Social and Political Science. Within that group I try to merge STS and environmental sociology, this being a long-standing interest on my part. Slowly but surely through my work I’ve developed an interest in science, knowledge-making, public participation and also to a certain degree policy-making. I apply the Science and Technology Studies outlook to environmental topics, that’s my main research area.     

 

Q: How do you see Citizen Science in relation to other aspects of Open Science?  

Citizen Science has just developed and changed incredibly in the last few decades. And there’s no doubt new technologies have had a determining role in its developing. If you think of Open Science as a kind of access issue, I think Citizen Science has a clear role in that. There’s also the issue of open research data, the extent to which researchers have access to research databases and so on and the extent they can benefit from that.

But I think where Citizen Science can represent a really interesting opportunity is at the level of open collaboration. I think that’s where Citizen Science can place itself in this Open Science movement. As Citizen Science becomes a more institutionalised movement, it  becomes part of its nature  to present this narrative of being inherently collaborative or co-created knowledge and science. So that is where I think Citizen Science can have a role in making (Open) Science more accessible.

I do have a critical outlook on this. This is the narrative that is presented to everyone and it has excellent support institutionally in terms of international organisations and political institutions, both at the European level, in the US, and here in the UK. There’s huge support for Citizen Science to be developed and implemented as a new kind of research endeavour. I think that’s fundamental, it’s very positive, just the idea even of giving citizens a role in the system of knowledge production is revolutionary to a degree. I think that’s very interesting, and something that has motivated me to look into these initiatives.

However, one of the things that motivates me personally in terms of research is to analyse the extent to which Citizen Science is really open to citizens’ involvement. There are some variations in terms of the classification of Citizen Science projects  for example at the level of participation; to make it simple we can say some projects are contributory by nature while others are more collaborative or co-created.

We can say that such a contribution can be just lending assistance, limited maybe to data gathering or that citizens are in principle involved from start to end. So really from the definition of the project to the outputs; the publication and knowledge generation (their participation in the publications and so on). And there are very good examples of both of these kinds of possible ways of involving citizens. But what I think is worth analysing is really the extent to which citizens are truly involved, in terms of the participatory and co-creation side of the projects; where they are really taking part in science making. Or whether they are just helping out on someone else’s scientific inquiry. There have been questions asked in terms of whether citizens are really taking part in scientific inquiry, as it’s traditionally defined or whether Citizen Science is  a proxy for that. So that’s what I’m interested in analysing. And also the  role of Citizen Science in the making of other “citizenships”; so in terms of my personal interests at the moment I’m developing a research grant on these new practices and notions of public participation. And Citizen Science is one of those. So I think there are many interesting questions there. There are many opportunities, but there are challenges as well and we need, as social scientists, to ask and analyse those equally.

Q: Do you see it as part of your role to try and encourage more of your colleagues here at Edinburgh to get involved with Citizen Science? 

 

That’s a very interesting question.

PW: So you’re scrutinising, so maybe that’s a conflict, actually.

ER: But there’s something very interesting there. I was involved some years back in this Citizen Science and crowdsourcing network here at Edinburgh. That has been dormant for a few years now. Some of the colleagues involved have moved on. The outlook of Citizen Science has changed since that time, we are in an altogether different moment now.

I would be interested in including more social scientists in Citizen Science. It is easier to find colleagues in the natural sciences taking advantage of the benefits of Citizen Science, for example, if they have a huge amount of data, if there is geographical data for instance, it’s easier to see how citizens can play a crucial role in producing new knowledge.

In the social sciences, although we are very used to analysing these processes, we have been slower to take those elements into our research. There have been some experiments, and there’s absolutely more discussion now about how social science can also be seen as or transformed into a Citizen Social Science. It’s rather paradoxical that we don’t do it because we’ve always worked with the public, with citizens’ rights, social sciences are about people. So it’s been a slow process, the uptake of Citizen Science methods for our own research, and I’m also very interested in understanding that – why is that? We have the people at the core of our research, it may be that there are some ethical issues preventing us from involving citizens so clearly.

 

PW: I had a Citizen Science project and I ended up not having time for it, and so I had to cancel it [Citizen Science Against Sleeping Sickness] . I’ve felt very sad about that, but when you’re doing this in your spare time, then if you don’t have time…

ER: A crucial aspect is really that involving citizens and making them part of your research takes time. It isn’t something that you can just say ‘hey guys, would you like to come and do this with me?’, you need to nurture that relationship obviously. So if you don’t have the resources, and time is a crucial resource, then you’re up against a huge obstacle.

Q: What would you say to a colleague who was potentially interested in Citizen Science but hadn’t managed to get started, what pitfalls would you warn them of?   

Well to start with, the advantages are amazing, that’s what one should be focusing on. So if there’s any interest, if there is an idea or even if you just have a lot of data and you don’t have time to deal with it, think of citizens, I would say, think of the public as participants. Sometimes we think people don’t care, people are not interested. Those are assumptions that have time and time again proven to be wrong. There is a lot of interest. There is a lot of potential out there for citizen participation in research. They are curious people and they don’t even need to have previous scientific training or anything. But, OK, one needs to be aware that most likely you need some resources, some funding, depending on the extent of the project, on the level of participation you’re aiming to have from the citizens. You need institutional support. It’s better to have a team involved in this rather than being the single researcher just because of the time issue (to allow the sort of engagement you need to have with those who take part in your project). And these people for the most part will be volunteers. That’s in the very notion of Citizen Science. In some cases, some test cases, there is a small compensation, but the compensation can also be primarily symbolic. You may thank the participants in your resulting publications.

At the level of the science itself and the scientific knowledge, there may be issues of representativeness, validity of the data, research ethics. I think people will have to have a sort of mechanism in place to prevent this becoming an issue. That’s where new technologies and gadgets, sensors, etc. will have a key role. They will, for instance, reduce the validity issues that have been put forward as a critical limitation for citizen involvement in science initiatives. There will always be some obstacles but this shouldn’t prevent anyone from taking this potentially into their research, and there are certainly ways of making it work.

Citizens have always, always been involved in scientific research and knowledge production as amateurs. That history is really significant and it’s a lesson for all of us involved in scientific research.

Q: Could you give us an example of environmental Citizen Science in Edinburgh? 

I teach a course on Sustainable Development, and it is at that level that I have been more closely involved with local groups, especially because the course I’m referring to is based on case studies of sustainable development – looking at different ways and different settings where sustainable development is practised and what notions are involved in terms of this very idea of sustainable development. The SHRUB Co-operative is I think a very good example, they have a repair shop, a swap shop and a café . Their ultimate objective is zero waste. They started as a student group just wanting to recycle and reuse better.

Q: Could you give us an example of a Citizen Science project you have studied for your research?   

I’m analysing one project in the South of England: there’s a bunch of people, studying basically all aspects of the life of a forest. They’ve been doing this for years, mostly they’re retired, some have a scientific background, and they have time. They have a natural curiosity about all things nature related. They started with basic stuff, ‘How are we doing in terms of biodiversity in our forest?’. And then the interest has expanded to other areas. They have the collaboration of botanists and scientists from time to time. They go to the local community centre or another local venue to provide training in terms of how they can produce – there you go, the key word – reliable and valid records of, for example, fungi. But also training about how to analyse the samples collected and recorded. They’re looking at rusts (fungal plant diseases) as well – they’re collecting samples of leaves that they send to the specialist for identification. They hold workshops. Their activities have been reduced because of the pandemic in recent months. The key thing here for me is: all that this group is doing, they did by themselves, they took the initiative themselves, there wasn’t one scientist who came along and offered to improve their data, it wasn’t like that at all, it was the group who decided what to do and when. Even without scientists they have a fundamental role in knowledge production. So if we add the input of scientists, if that relationship is kept, nurtured and engaging, and if they feel that they are contributing to a wider good I think we will be able to achieve huge things.

Leave a reply

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

css.php

Report this page

To report inappropriate content on this page, please use the form below. Upon receiving your report, we will be in touch as per the Take Down Policy of the service.

Please note that personal data collected through this form is used and stored for the purposes of processing this report and communication with you.

If you are unable to report a concern about content via this form please contact the Service Owner.

Please enter an email address you wish to be contacted on. Please describe the unacceptable content in sufficient detail to allow us to locate it, and why you consider it to be unacceptable.
By submitting this report, you accept that it is accurate and that fraudulent or nuisance complaints may result in action by the University.

  Cancel