When citizen science is public relations

Abstract

Amid rising interest in participatory research, some industries have recently begun to practice public relations citizen science (PRCS). Unlike citizen science and crowdsourcing projects that generate raw materials for product development, PRCS benefits capitalist firms primarily by improving their public image and deflecting accusations of causing harm. Three cases illustrate how PRCS works: (1) a growing assortment of citizen science projects associated with Antarctic tourism, (2) an initiative to document biodiversity, linked to Canada’s oil and gas industry, and (3) a study sponsored by Biology Fortified, a nonprofit organization that works to communicate positive information about agricultural biotechnology. Scientists and research organizations may have legitimate reasons for entering into these partnerships, but PRCS can benefit industries in problematic ways. First, by supporting environmental science, PRCS can attach a ‘sustainable’ image to a polluting industry, without changing its core practices. Second, PRCS can accumulate data and steer volunteers’ observations in ways that undermine claims about the harms caused by the industry’s practices or products. Finally, in some cases, PRCS organizers hope to induce people to view an industry more ‘rationally’ than those who make ‘emotional’ or ‘ideological’ claims about its harms.

Is Citizen Science a Remedy for Inequality?

“…In a more recent paper, Blacker, Kimura, and Kinchy (2021) showed how corporate interests have used what they call “public relations citizen science” to deflect attention away from environmental harm, thus improving their public image. The corporate interests achieve these goals in several ways: by attaching a “‘sustainable’ image to a polluting industry, without changing its core practices,” by designing projects in ways that direct attention away from the particular problems caused by the industry’s practices or products, and by emphasizing “rational” approaches to industry instead of “emotional” or “ideological” perspectives (Blacker, Kimura, and Kinchy 2021, 1). The key point is that corporations, which already have substantial economic power, use the forms of citizen science to reinforce and add to that power.…”

“…The challenges of inequality that citizen science faces range from the mundane, such as barriers of access presented by language or cost (Márquez and Porras 2020), to the structural, such as sponsorship of citizen science activities by established institutions poorly placed for challenging social inequality (Dawson 2019) or by corporations and others actively seeking to undermine social critique (Blacker, Kimura, and Kinchy 2021). But some of the challenges are even deeper, based in the conflicting understandings of what terms like public engagement or citizen science mean.…”

Improving a framework for evaluating participatory science

“…Language in the framework reflects naïve positivist traditions (Coburn et al, 2013; Smith, 1999), which persist in making Indigenous scholars position their work differently to that of Western scientists (Foley, 2003), even if they are experts in the latter as well (Rigney, 2001). Scholars have expressed concern that citizen science is being co-opted by corporate interests in ways incompatible with sustainability, for example, to ‘assuage customers’ guilt about vacationing in an ecologically fragile place’ (Blacker et al, 2021: 5). Similarly, we express concern that citizen science is likewise being co-opted to assuage settlers’ guilt about being and collecting data on First Nations lands through the frame of helping science.…”

Constituting good citizen scientists within environmental citizen science discourse

“…3. See Blacker et al (2021) for a discussion of the elitist, exclusionary, and increasingly corporateinfluenced nature of many citizen science endeavours. They note that the term "citizen science" may itself be problematic "because it suggests that citizenship might be a necessary prerequisite for 199 participation in science, thereby marginalizing those denied citizenship, including refugees, immigrants, many Indigenous peoples and stateless people" (p. 11).…”