Entanglements of responsibility: On designing citizen science communication

In the dissertation "Entanglements of responsibility: on designing citizen science communication", I investigate the importance of communication in citizen science. Recent studies in citizen science show that public participation in science communication can increase citizens' democratic ability to act. They point to significant changes in the relationship between researchers and citizens and question who can create scientific knowledge and which parts of the world should be the subject of scientific study. Existing research highlights direct communication with and feedback to participants as being crucial to successful citizen science that strengthens participants' motivation, understanding of, and engagement in citizen science. Despite these results, we still lack knowledge about these communication formats and how to design more responsible forms of dialogical engagement that promote citizens' democratic action. In the PhD project, I investigate this issue based on the following research questions: How can we design new forms of citizen science communication in The Sound of Denmark to strengthen citizens' democratic actions?

In the PhD project, I investigate how a participatory design approach and co-design activities can be used to create new knowledge about designing citizen science communication that strengthens citizens' democratic capacities. The PhD project, which is part of the research and development program Our Museum, is empirically situated in the citizen science project, The Sound of Denmark (SOD). The citizen science project is developed in collaboration with the Center for Macroecology, Evolution of Climate (CMEC). The Sound of Denmark is a citizen science project that makes it possible for citizens to participate in the mapping of the Danish soundscape and thereby contribute to the scientific research at CMEC. As a member of the SOD project/ developer team, I partake as an ethnographic design researcher. Within this context, the PhD project aims to strengthen citizenship through participatory design workshops that enable participants to influence the final design. The purpose is achieved by examining how citizen science communication is designed, implemented and evaluated by involving potential participants as co-designers of the citizen science project to strengthen the participants' democratic actions.

The research question is asked and investigated in a context that combines theoretical and practical dimensions such as participatory design, citizen science, and scientific citizenship. These dimensions are outlined in Chapter 3. In addition, the PhD project presents an analytical dimension and theoretical framework based on Kare Barad's agential realism. What follows is my argument that her concepts and relational ontology can help us better understand materiality and non-human agencies in a citizen science context. Moreover, her concepts can create new knowledge on how materiality in a citizen science context matters, which materializations take place, and what analytical consequences agential realist thinking has for the production of knowledge. In other words, agential realism and its concepts open up a situated research approach that deals with the real effects of knowledge practices to work with knowledge as something processual and creative, always in becoming. My research is situated in this process of becoming.

In Chapter 4, I unfold the PhD project's research design, including methods, empirical materials, participatory design process and my role as an ethnographic design researcher in the project team in The Sound of Denmark.

In chapters 5 and 6, I unfold my analyses, discussions and contributions in three directions with a view to 1) creating new knowledge about participatory design in a citizen science context in collaboration with potential participants and further how forming process can contribute to and strengthen the overall design of SOD. By combining a participatory design approach that involves potential participants in the development of citizen science communication in SOD with citizen science communication and scientific citizenship, the PhD project contributes to a better understanding of how to design and implement responsible citizen science communication in the project, The Sound of Denmark.

2) In my analysis of "Machinic agencies and technoscientific apparatuses", I examine the technological entanglements of the citizen science project (the implemented design) as a scientific apparatus to create new knowledge about how humans and non-humans actively reconfigure certain knowledge practices and agencies through their entanglements. I demonstrate that this has obvious consequences for us as researchers and developers because we are part of these intricacies that continue to design and produce unhealthy and unfair exclusions, constraints, and power structures. On that basis, we need to reconsider and understand the implications of our designs and how they continue to design agencies and exclusions to design more responsible forms of citizen science communication. From this perspective, my use of Barad's agential realism and its concepts contribute to new knowledge about participatory design and how to design more responsible forms of citizen engagement.

3) In the third part of the analysis, "Enacting scientific citizenship: entangled responsibility and enactments of concern", I demonstrate how scientific citizenship is implemented at different times through the citizens' intra-active engagement with SOD. I show how citizens not only contribute to scientific research but rather monopolize citizenship through their material commitments as an integral part of the project in its continuous development. I also show that scientific citizenship in SOD is shaped through the material-discursive practices of both humans and non-humans, which is why scientific citizenship is better understood as both human and non-human intra-actions.

Finally, I argue that designing more responsible forms of citizen involvement will require an account of the entanglements to highlight the limitations and exclusions that both project teams, researchers and citizens have a role in shaping. I suggest that future research at the intersections of citizen science, design, and scientific citizenship should reconsider the material-discursive entanglements of which we are all a part to engage in new questions and examine our relational responsibilities in a more-than-human world that addresses both the "agential cuts" we are affected by and more affirmative possibilities. Citizen science is a fertile space for such experiments because it contains an intertwined diversity of lay knowledge and expert knowledge that can potentially form the basis for developing more responsible futures and forms of collaboration.