Short abstract:

Digitalization opens new possibilities for public participation in science. Organizations are key for better understanding and critically reflecting such transformations. This will be explored for the case of Citizen Science.

Long abstract:

This paper examines how organizations matter for transformations in science-society relations with digitalization. It focuses on inclusion, i.e., how people are made relevant in communication. Approaches for public participation in science and technology aim at pushing the boundaries of who is regarded as part of science and what potential involvement can look like. Citizen Science is a recent iteration of such inclusion programs. It seeks to facilitate the active participation of more people in research with the help of digital technologies. This setting is typically examined with a critical ambition regarding the question of whether it affords bottom-up or top-down forms of participation.

My research aims to transgress this framing and open up new angles of critique by drawing on the notion of organization. It is at the meso-level of organizations, I argue, that macro-processes like establishing new inclusion (policy) programs and micro-processes like doing participatory research are brought – partially and tensely – together.

My talk will focus on the dimension of organizations as sites of social transformation. I will analyze Citizen Science as a template for a shift in the inclusion order of science from organizational membership to contributorship. I will discuss how this transformation is stabilized and how organizations are themselves transformed in the process. What potential implications does this entail for science-society relations? And where can we refocus critiques to render new aspects of this transformation up for debate?