Paper short abstract:

This work explores how citizen scientists renegotiate the inscriptions of projects located between science and games and how (citizen) science can be meaningful beyond knowledge production, as a form of coping with everyday life marked by challenges such as incurable disease or an ongoing pandemic.

Paper long abstract:

While advocates of citizen science argue that it democratizes science by opening up knowledge production to society, others criticize that citizen science projects both reproduce hierarchies and exploit volunteers without letting them participate in the actual step of knowledge production.

This paper, in contrast, proposes another approach to discussing citizen science, changing the focus from power relations and potential impact on traditional scientific roles to the volunteer participants themselves. Based on ethnographic research of two online citizen science games, I investigate how participants perceive the projects and what meanings they ascribe to them. This perspective shows how the in-betweenness of these projects - between science and games - allows participants to adopt the systems in their own way while at the same time rejecting their designation as "games". I argue that this rejection is linked to the motivation and meaning of contribution to citizen science as a form of enduring the everyday in which participants face unresolvable challenges, in this case a still-incurable disease. Here, citizen science allows them to feel less helpless by contributing to research that aims at finding a treatment or cure, as well as to feel empowered to actively do something to help affected relatives or friends or, preventatively, themselves. The meaning of citizen science as a form of coping with everyday life also became particularly visible during the COVID-19 pandemic: Unprecedented numbers of volunteers started to participate in various coronavirus-related research projects in order to "do something" and overcome their perceived powerlessness.