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Paper short abstract

This presentation shares the collapsing of one citizen science project into a re-directed attention to another, on Mafia Island, Tanzania. From (failed attempts at) eco-acoustic recordings, to community-led whale shark documentation in an effort to promote eco-tourism and marine conservation.

Paper long abstract

Long abstract: As part of my PhD research, I intended to records sounds of the Anthropocene (or lack thereof) with citizen scientists, over nine interspersed months of fieldwork on Mafia Island, Tanzania. When I arrived to Mafia Island, citizen science was already very much present, albeit in a different configuration. Residents of Mafia were part of ongoing citizen science projects, documenting whale sharks in their waters. I abandoned my own citizen science plans, and starting observing the efforts, particularly among those involved in tourism, to incorporate citizen science into the bourgeoning of Mafia as an eco-destination centred around conservation. This presentation argues that residents of Mafia are challenging the conventional boundaries of citizen science, through engaging in their own, self-organised projects that prioritised their own needs above external researchers’. Realising that the people of Mafia Island have a better grasp on citizen science than I did, the ethnographic parametres of citizen science being brought to the fieldsite were reconstituted. My failures as a citizen science facilitator lent to a pivoting of focus and perception of citizen science initiatives that re-oriented the researcher/ and the researched. The citizen science projects in Mafia led me to WWF offices, tour guide Community-Based Organisations, and unexpectedly, to women-only meditation groups from the United Kingdom, on retreat in Mafia. These circumstances allowed for a listening, not to the sounds of the Anthropocene, but to the attempts of those in Mafia Island to place themselves, ecologically and socially, on the map of conservation-based initiatives.