- Convenors:
-
Rebecca Carlson
(University of Oulu)
Monica Vasile (University of Oulu, Finland)
Stefan Prost (University of Oulu)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Roundtable
Short Abstract
This roundtable explores how friction between institutions, researchers and communities shapes citizen science. We’ll discuss challenges around data validity, participation, and authority—and how these forces can spark more equitable, community-driven scientific change.
Description
Friction is both a signal of trouble and a catalytic spark—a force that can hold things together, create tension, drive transformation, and pull things apart. This roundtable explores friction not only as a site of conflict between knowledge systems or stakeholders, but a generative force that can stabilize, redirect, and transform how science is practiced, for whom, and to what ends.
Drawing on experience in transdisciplinary and community-led research, participants will examine how friction emerges at the interface between dominant scientific institutions and marginalised or place-based knowledge systems. We will explore challenges of knowledge legitimacy, including how concerns around data validity, methodological rigor, and the perceived credibility of non-expert contributions shape the conditions for collaboration.
What kinds of friction arise around data ownership, labor, and decision-making? How does citizen science align with, or challenge, established scientific baselines and success metrics, particularly in ecological restoration and conservation? What structural forces limit meaningful community participation, and how do institutional norms, funding priorities, and conventional project designs reinforce dominant centres of scientific authority? And crucially: how can this be changed? What would it mean to involve citizens not just as data collectors, but as full participants with the power to shape research agendas and interpret results?
We invite critical reflection and open dialogue on how friction can be a tool for rebalancing power in citizen science, and how discomfort may serve as a generative entry point for building more inclusive, responsive, and transformative collaborations.
Accepted contributions
Short Abstract
While contributory citizen science promotes "easy" participation through data collection, volunteers co-create participation with their everyday and meaningful knowledge and data care practices. Considering this friction, which is at the core of my PhD, may help us reimagine participation politics.
Abstract
The topic of the roundtable perfectly aligns with my research interest around participation politics and the search for alternatives.
While contributory biodiversity citizen science (CS) promotes "easy" participation through data collection, my PhD research revealed previously overlooked dimensions of volunteer practice: (non-requested) knowledge and data care practices that made participation meaningful. Through ethnographic fieldwork in Australia, my study demonstrated that participants did not simply "collect, submit, and forget" about data. Instead, they engaged in complex, emotionally-charged practices of caring about, for, and with data. Volunteer practices extended far beyond official platforms, since these platforms tend to perform participation solely as individual data collection. Even in contributory projects, volunteers co-created participation, imprinting their own logics onto CS.
In line with the idea of “Friction as Force”, the volunteers I interviewed navigated tensions between institutional expectations and their own deep investments in data. They duplicated records across multiple platforms due to fears of data loss, memorized statistics and facts to carry knowledge beyond platforms (and train, teach, or advocate), and they experienced profound emotional connections to files that triggered memories or demonstrated CS impact. Yet these valuable practices, instrumental for program success and volunteer retention, have remained mostly invisible to CS programs. When programs fail to accommodate these caring practices (such as when seasonal data is erased), volunteers may disengage entirely.
By making data care visible, I seek to discuss a) how control over data may be better distributed, and b) how programs may better embrace volunteers’ agency to define participation.
Short Abstract
Freshwater ecologists in a citizen science project on Lake Geneva navigate tensions between positivist science and citizen participation. Interviews show how friction around control, rigor and values can inspire change in how scientists view collaboration and inclusive knowledge production.
Abstract
*Introduction*
Citizen science is widely promoted as a means to democratize knowledge production and foster inclusive research practices. However, its participatory ideals often conflict with established scientific norms and expectations. This study explores how freshwater ecologists perceive science and citizen science at the outset of their involvement in CoFish, a collaborative project focused on fish in Lake Geneva. By examining the tensions and transformations that emerge, the study considers how friction between traditional and participatory models can act as a catalyst for epistemic change.
*Theoretical and Methodological Approach*
The study draws on person-centered, semi-structured interviews with freshwater ecologists from diverse institutional backgrounds. It uses a framework inspired by Guba and Lincoln (2005), which distinguishes research paradigms along four dimensions: epistemology, methodology, values, and control. This framework was used to analyze how scientists conceptualize citizen science and their roles within it.
*Findings*
Most participants initially expressed positivist views of science, emphasizing objectivity, control, and hypothesis testing. As they engaged with the idea of citizen science, many became more open to participatory and constructivist perspectives. Friction emerged where participatory aspirations met concerns about data quality, scientific rigor, and loss of control. While some scientists embraced co-creation and stakeholder dialogue, others struggled with the epistemological and practical demands of participatory research.
*Implications*
The study highlights the need to support scientists in navigating the shift from traditional to participatory models. Reflective practice, training in participatory methods, and openness to alternative epistemologies are essential for reconfiguring power dynamics and fostering meaningful collaboration in citizen science.
Short Abstract
I explore how friction and messiness shape youth-led research in the Youth LIVES project. I’m interested in how discomfort, care, and institutional tension can become productive forces for more inclusive and reflexive forms of citizen science.
Abstract
My research explores youth participation and co-production in mental health research through the Youth LIVES project, a collaborative initiative that positions young people as co-researchers. Through this work, I have come to see friction not as failure but as a force that resists the institutional drive towards tidiness. Working alongside young people to design and carry out research has revealed moments of both creativity and tension, where ethics procedures, safeguarding protocols, and funding timelines often sit uneasily alongside relational and participatory practices.
These experiences have shaped my interest in the potential of messiness in citizen science. Rather than smoothing over difficulty, I have learned to treat friction as a signal of care and accountability, and as an opening for more reflexive, inclusive practice. Negotiating dynamic consent, flexible authorship, and equitable payment structures has offered ways to redistribute power and challenge conventional hierarchies of expertise.
In this roundtable, I hope to share reflections on how friction and mess can act as productive forces in citizen science, and to learn from others working at similar intersections of participation, power, and institutional constraint. I am particularly interested in how discomfort and uncertainty might become catalysts for more just and responsive collaborations.
Short Abstract
Urban ReLeaf shows how friction in citizen science—around ethics, data practices, and cross-sector collaboration—can drive more inclusive, adaptive, and context-sensitive approaches to urban monitoring and planning.
Abstract
Urban ReLeaf is a multi-city and multi-sector collaboration aimed at integrating citizen-generated data into urban policy and planning processes, with a strong focus on inclusivity, ethics, and institutional co-production. In our work across six diverse European cities, we also encounter friction—between institutional expectations and citizen priorities, between data governance requirements and the need for open, inclusive participation. These frictions expose tensions around technology readiness, knowledge legitimacy, or the ethics of collecting sensitive socio-demographic data to assess inclusivity. Rather than obstacles, these tensions act as catalysts for experimentation in designing operational data ecosystems, fostering dialogue between institutional and community knowledge systems, and redefining citizens as collaborators rather than data gatherers only. At this roundtable, we intend share case-specific reflections on how navigating friction in Urban ReLeaf has surfaced ethical dilemmas (e.g., consent and transparency), reshaped institutional expectations, and revealed gaps in cross-sector understanding. We are particularly interested in exploring how friction around data ethics, perceived credibility, authority, information value, and institutional rigidity can be leveraged to support more reflexive and equitable project design. Urban ReLeaf’s experience shows that acknowledging and addressing these tensions head-on can create space for learning on how to create more robust and embedded citizen science.