Ethical boundary work in citizen science

The concept of boundary work (Gieryn 1983, 1999) has been developed to capture theways in which scientists collectively defend and demarcate their intellectual territories.This article applies the concept of boundary work to the ethical realm and investigates theethical boundary work performed by researchers in the field of citizen science (CS) througha literature review and by analysing accounts of ethics presented in CS literature.Results show that ethical boundary work in the CS literature is, to a large extent, a matterof managing ambiguities and paradoxes without any clear boundaries drawn between theunethical and ethical. Scientists are negotiating ethical positions, which might, occasionally,enhance the ethical authority of ‘non-science’ and non-scientists, as well as maintainalready established research ethics. The main ethical boundary work in CS displaysvariations towards perceived insufficiencies of conventional research ethics to accommodate“outsiders”, addressing issues of distribution, relevance, and expulsion as science includevolunteer contributors in the scientific process.

‘Not in our Name’

In this paper, we draw on our collaborative work running a salon for thinking about care in STS research, which quickly became more about fostering an ethico-politics for thinking with care as a mode of academic intervention. Not dissimilar to the origins of the salon in nineteenth-century France, the salon provided a provocative and disruptive space for early career researchers (ECRs) to think together. As attention and critique increasingly point towards the unequal distribution of harms arising from marketization and the vulnerability of ECRs in the ‘neoliberal university,’ we have witnessed a surge in activities that promise a supportive space, such as pre-conference conferences, seminar series, discussion forums and self-care workshops. In this paper, we ask not only what these modes of care might make possible, but also what exclusionary practices and patterns they mask or render more palatable (Ahmed, 2004; Duclos & Criado, 2020; Martin et al., 2015; Murphy, 2015). Reflecting on our experiences of organizing and participating in the salon, with the stated purpose to explore ‘ecologies of care’ as an embodied socio-material practice (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017), we move from care ‘out there’ in STS research to care ‘in here’. We follow threads spun by and out from the group to rethink our own academic care practices and how to do the academy otherwise.

About the cover artist

The front cover features an illustration made by Helena Cleeve. The illustration, which was created particularly for this special issue seeks to outline how care practices may simultaneously enact diverging and contradictory realities. Care may be reparative, creative and transformative but also constricting, selective, and derivative.

Contradictory cares in community-led planning

The affective, practical and political dimensions of care are conventionally marginalised in spatial planning in the UK, in which technical evidence and certified expert judgements are privileged. Citizens are encouraged to participate in the planning system to influence how the places where they live will change. But to make the kind of arguments that are influential, their care for place must be silenced. Then in 2011, the Localism Act introduced neighbourhood planning to the UK, enabling community groups to write their own statutory planning policies. This initiative explicitly valorized care and affective connection with place, and associated care with knowledge of place (rather than opposing it to objective evidence). Through long-term ethnographic studies of two neighbourhood planning groups I trace the contours of care in this innovative space. I show how the groups’ legitimacy relies on their enactment of three distinct identities and associated sources of authority. Each identity embodies different objects, methods, exclusions and ideals of care, which are in tension and sometimes outright conflict with each other. Neighbourhood planning groups have to find ways to hold these tensions and ambivalences together, and how they do so determines what gets cared for and how. I describe the relations of care embodied by each identity and discuss the (ontological) politics of care that arise from the particular ways in which different modes of care are made to hang together: how patterns of exclusion and marginalisation are reproduced through a policy which explicitly seeks to undo them, and how reconfiguring relations between these identities can enable different cares to be realised. This analysis reveals care in practices that tend to be seen as antithetical to caring, and enables speculation about how silenced relations could be made visible and how policy could do care better.

Destructive care

There is a growing awareness of the essential similarities between care and maintenance notions in more-than-human settings. Whereas the concept of care is increasingly extended towards non-living organisms, research on maintenance and repair still focuses mainly on technologies and infrastructures. This article extends the realm of maintenance theorizing towards humans' caretaking activities and discusses the concepts' parallels. It focuses on the case study of Veps ethnic minority in Karelia, Northwestern Russia. Since the 18th century, Veps have been extracting rare ornamental stones: gabbro-diabase and raspberry quartzite. The article demonstrates that Veps workers engage in close bodily and material interactions with the mining industry. Whereas many of them enter into affective relations with the stone, their attitudes towards their bodies and health become estranged and detached. The article introduces the concept of "destructive care" to analyze the process of the workers' growing alienation from their bodily needs. Through the Veps' example, the article demonstrates that the logics of care and maintenance become entangled in the realm of human – material co-existence.

Editorial: Care in STS

During the last 10 years the Science and Technology Studies (STS) community has witnessed a flourishing, intense and multifaceted engagement around “care”. While care had been addressed already before in Joanna Latimer’s The conduct of care: Understanding nursing practice (Latimer, 2000) , and in Jeanette Pols’ Good care: Enacting a complex ideal in long term-psychiatry (Pols, 2004), care seemed to be on everybody’s lips around 2010. Around the same time, the edited volume Care in practice: On tinkering in clinics, homes and farms (Mol et al., 2010) and the article Matters of care in technoscience: Assembling neglected things (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011) were published. With akin, yet partly diverging, agendas and concerns, these two key publications drastically increased the amount of research that identify with something like an area of “care studies” in STS. This can also be seen in the publication of special issues devoted to care during the last years, notably the much-cited 2015 issue in Social Studies of Science focused on feminist technoscience interventions into the politics and “darker sides” of care (Martin et al., 2015), and the more recent on relationalities and specificities of care in East Asian Science, Technology and Society (Coopmans & McNamara, 2020). Noteworthy is also the special issue on “The politics of policy practices” in The Sociological Review Monograph, where Gill et al. (2017) discuss how policy and care are entangled, and how such entanglements could be enacted more “care-fully”. These publications have spurred rich and generative engagements about ways to attend to the affective, ethico-political and/or material layers of care, within and beyond areas traditionally thought of as related to care (such as healthcare and childcare).

Careful place

In Vallastaden, a newly built city district in Sweden, place is carefully crafted to make it into a role model city district of the future. These “careful places” are built with care, but also require physical care, such as cleaning and gardening, as well as administrative care through paperwork and organizing. This article focuses on how thinking with care in the analysis of the planning for and living in Vallastaden can contribute to highlighting the complexities often made invisible in city planning and put what is marginalized at the centre. The article empirically studies how the planning of careful places is done in planning documents and builds on workshops with residents in Vallastaden. In the workshops, inhabitants of Vallastaden are asked to draw their own map of their city district, so called mental maps. These mental maps are discussed with regard to how place in Vallastaden enables care, is cared for, and what troubles they bring. Careful place has the power to create tensions in planning, which is handled by making some matters absent or translated into other matters of care. Likewise, careful place is enacted with multifold practices in the everyday life of the residents in Vallastaden, intertwining self-care, care for the environment as well as a caring space for sharing problems in virtual space. Staying with the troubles of careful place creates awareness of otherwise neglected matters, such as how socio-economic diversity is translated into diversity in housing, and through this approach turn to the ethico-politics of urban planning.

Abandoning questionnaires

Care-concepts have proliferated over the past couple of years, and have been used tostudy all kinds of practices, situations and sites. This begs the question: What is gained bystudying practices in terms of care? The paper addresses this question by using a specificcare-approach, which is the study of daily life dealings (Mol et al., 2010). It mobilises thisapproach to investigate a particular object, namely a good provision of haemodialysistreatment in nephrology practice. It does so in a given place, a dialysis unit in Austria.Based on ethnographic fieldwork with a focus on how patients' quality of life was improved,the paper reports how, in this dialysis unit, a quality of life questionnaire was introducedbut soon abandoned. It first analyses how the prominent ideal that quality of life is to bemeasured with a questionnaire arrived in the goings-on in the unit. It then teases out howconnecting and disconnecting patients to dialysis machines, and seeing them during thedaily round enacted knowing, improving and quality of life in other ways than the prominentpractice. It argues that questionnaires, forms, protocols, and the prominent practice theyare part of may not only be made to fit into daily clinical practices or that daily life dealingsare other to prominent practices. Daily clinical practices may also be the basis upon whichquestionnaires, forms, protocols, and the prominent practice they are part of are evaluated,abandoned, and forgotten. Recommending further investigation into the conditions ofpossibilities for alternative enactments of a good provision of health care to thrive, thepaper concludes that what has been gained by using this specific care-approach to studythis particular object are insights into daily life practices that have so far been othered innephrology practice and STS.

Citizen science

How do civic educators and citizen communities co-construct access, interaction, and participation and bridge contributory and democratized citizen science? This study builds on interviews and observations with amateur naturalists, professional biologists, and public authorities about their participation in the Species Observations System (SO)—Norway’s largest citizen science (CS) project. Over more than twenty years, CS has been understood as either contributory (contributing with data) or democratized (emancipating the pursuit of science). Following these models, CS studies has developed a number of classifications of CS projects. The present article aims to bridge contributory CS and democratized CS by using the access, interaction, and participation (AIP) model outlined by Carpentier, without extending the number of classifications. Access and interaction signify contributory CS. Well-functioning technology is a precondition for joining the ranks of records, contributors, validators, and institutional actors. Interaction is the second founding stone of participation, and organizations are crucial to facilitating interaction. Participation signifies democratized CS. The choice of technology involves important dimensions of power, as technology structures actions. However, the ability to build and sustain the technological infrastructure also illustrates that participation is organizational power, enacted both from the bottom-up and top-down.