In 1902, a contributor to Popular Science affirmed that “The era of the amateur scientist is passing; science must now be advanced by the professional expert.” Throughout the twentieth century, amateurs have been increasingly excluded from the production of scientific knowledge. But since the 1990s, under the banner of “citizen science”, a growing number of initiatives have involved, once again, amateurs in science, with the goal of democratizing science, promoting scientific literacy, and solving big data problems. The creation of SETI@home at UC Berkeley in 1998 embodied all these aims. Within six month, it had attracted more than one million participants analyzing radio signals from space on their personal computer searching for signs of extraterrestrial life. The initiators of the project and the media constructed the image of the participant along the lines of an imagined amateur scientist making discoveries outside of scientific institutions, while contributing to the making of a global scientific citizenship. Infused by libertarian, countercultural, and cyber-utopian ideals, SETI@home seemed to capture the scientific aspirations of a new generation. But the tens of thousands of online biographical sketches left by the participants present a more nuanced picture. These traces offer a unique window into the self-fashioning of the participants into different kinds of “amateurs”, “volunteers”, and “hobbyists” with various views about professional science and its place in society. These sources helps us better understand the recent reconfigurations of the amateur scientist and, more generally, the struggles over the legitimacy of professional expertise.

The term “citizen science” has become very popular among scholars as well as the general public. The rapid expansion of citizen science, as a notion and a practice, has spawned a plethora of meanings. One of the most common usages today refers to voluntary lay participation in the production of scientific knowledge, often in the form of “crowd sourcing” on an Internet platform such as Zooniverse. So here lies the issue: the notion of citizen science is both very diffuse and very specific. To address that issue, this paper tries to do two things. First, it argues that it is necessary to situate what is called “citizen science” in the relevant historical currents/contexts. “Citizen science” draws on and derives from various historical traditions of knowledge production. It has not come from nowhere. With a historical perspective, we will be able to see the genealogy of citizen science and the limits of a presentist, ahistorical definition of citizen science. And, second, this paper suggests that a fruitful – and politically relevant – way to understand citizen science is through the concept of citizenship. The existing literature has focused more on the “science” rather than the “citizen” part of citizen science (while admitting that they are mutually constituted). It tends to take for granted the political/communal framework in which such scientific activities are designed and conducted. This paper proposes a new perspective that will allow us to better interpret various modes of citizen science in different times and societies.

It is widely recognized that achieving sustainability in the twenty-first century will require a reorientation of scientific research towards “usable” knowledge, particularly when it comes to climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for instance, was created to translate science into policy, but it has focused on long-term predictions of global temperature, rather than on shorter-term, regional-scale predictions that could help guide local policies. Generating actionable climate science will require incorporating the knowledge, experience, and values of those impacted by climate change into the process of producing and evaluating new research. This reorientation is already in progress—evident, for instance, in recent initiatives to incorporate the knowledge, experience, and values of “users,” “stakeholders,” and indigenous communities into the process of producing knowledge about the impacts of anthropogenic climate change. Strong claims are being made for the novelty of these modes of generating climate knowledge, but with little attention to history. In fact, the precedents for involving non-experts in scientific research date back to the very birth of professional science in the eighteenth century. This presentation considers the history of “co-production” in the earth sciences in order to identify the contingent assumptions and limitations of our own ways of doing science. I conclude that usability needs to be defined more broadly. In fact, conceptions of “useful knowledge” drawn from the past can help point the way forward.

The creation of The New York Botanical Garden, an International Plant Research Center at the heart of New York City—and the programs of study that followed since the 1890’s—have helped lay the foundation of ecology as a discipline in America. The Garden now connects an ever larger community of individuals to plants through citizen science programming. Active public involvement by ‘amateur naturalists,’ is ever more essential today to document the planet’s rapidly decreasing biodiversity. What can we learn from past and present approaches to environmental scholarship? Public engagement plays an indispensable role in the democratization of science by involving an increasingly diverse force of global and regional participants in a common effort to advance environmental knowledge and stewardship. The citizen science movement is reflective of wider societal forces and trends of interconnectedness: it encourages the establishment of new communities of activists that find common purpose to rally around local issues that may address broader environmental, legal and humanities concerns. This movement is supported by easily accessible new technologies—from extensive computer networks to cell phones with sophisticated apps, such as iNaturalist which the New York Botanical Garden uses for its EcoQuests; a program challenging New Yorkers to become citizen scientists and sustain nature in the City. Today’s rapidly evolving online social networks sharing observations on plants across the globe benefit Big Data and meta-analyses. Increased plant awareness in the public sphere has important consequences: it helps to mitigate plant blindness and catalyzes much needed further conservation action.

Today in China publicly minded social scientists are enthusiastically employing the methods of participatory action research, a form of engaged scholarship most famously associated with Brazilian philosopher of education Paolo Freire. Chinese social scientists typically treat participatory action research as a refreshing foreign paradigm that became accessible to China with the increasing academic exchanges made possible during the post-Mao Reform Era. However, anyone familiar with the discourse and practices of Mao-era science will recognize the profound similarities between the “mass science” of socialist China and participatory action research. And, indeed, participatory action research emerged during the 1960s and 1970s, when radical intellectuals around the world were studying the epistemological writings of Mao Zedong. This paper will explore the movement of ideas about participatory knowledge-making between China and other parts of the world during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As such it represents one step in the process of mapping—across temporal, geographical, ideological, and geopolitical boundaries—the larger global-historical context within which “citizen science” and other understandings of popular knowledge production have gained significance.