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Short abstract:

We share the perspectives of practitioners, researchers, and participants in citizen science (and related) projects from across the globe who participated in a postdigital collective writing project. We highlight tensions and possibilities their experiences revealed for postdigital citizen science.

Long abstract:

Citizen science has been characterized as the democratization of science--a ‘social movement’ that creates opportunities for the coming together of “science, policy makers, and society as a whole in an impactful way” (EU) and for “people from all walks of life” to participate in, develop, or lead studies of relevance to them and/or their communities (CitSciNZ, 2022). More recently, digital tools, including mobile apps, drones, sensors, GPS tools, etc., are becoming a cornerstone of citizen science initiatives, touted as ‘facilitating novel project development, public participation, data collection, visualization and sharing’ (CitSciNZ, 2022). As transdisciplinary scholars whose work intersects in the "postdigital" realm, we are interested in questions of how societies and institutions are (re)configured through socio-technical educational and political contexts in which the digital/analog are impossible to disentangle, i.e., postdigital education. We have begun to explore the dimensions of how these entanglements play out in citizen science and humanities. More recently, we recruited practitioners, researchers, and participants in citizen science (and related) projects to participate in a postdigital collective writing project in which they shared their own thoughts and experiences on citizen science. In this paper presentation, we highlight these diverse perspectives on citizen science from the contributors in citizen science projects across the globe. We discuss how the various approaches to citizen science articulated in the voices of practitioners themselves reveal tensions and possibilities in postdigital citizen science, the words we use to describe it, and the nuances in power and ethics across its multiple configurations.