@article{2798d620940740ceb75d7afd0cdea642,
title = "Institutions for Civic Technoscience: How Critical Making is Transforming Environmental Research",
abstract = "This article explores the changing relationship between the academy and new public formations of scientific research, which we term {"}civic technoscience.{"} Civic technoscience leverages tactics seen in critical making communities to question and transform how and who can make credible and actionable knowledge. A comparison of two case studies is used. The first is a grassroots mapping process that allows communities to generate high-quality aerial imagery. The second is an academic-led project using environmental sensors to engage disparate audiences in scientific practice. These two projects were found to differ in their ability to form strategic spaces for community-based science, and suggest pathways to foster more robust relationships across the public-academic divide. By altering power dynamics in material, literary, and social technologies used for scientific research, we argue that civic technoscience enables citizens to question expert knowledge production through critical making tactics, and creates opportunities to generate credible public science.",
keywords = "Public Lab, civic science, critical making, environmental justice, social movements, technoscience",
author = "Wylie, {Sara Ann} and Kirk Jalbert and Shannon Dosemagen and Matt Ratto",
note = "Funding Information: These tools are unlike standard laboratory research tools, which stay the same from place to place. They are locally modified and transformed. But these local modifications can also be shared through social technologies like the Public Lab website, which encourages users to write and share notes describing their work. This sharing back to the community is encouraged through the literary technology of open source hardware and software licenses that have “share alike” provisions.9 These provisions require that changes or modifications to the existing software or hardware also be open source so that they can contribute back to the knowledge base of the larger community. This legal structure is supported by sociotechnical infrastructures like the research note, community archive, and mailing list. Unlike traditional expert scientific societies, membership in Public Lab is free and the research notes can be read by anyone with Web access. The literary technology of open source licensing encourages active recognition of the role of individual contributors to research results and technology developments. Contributors to projects are identified individually on the Public Lab website by the number of research notes they{\textquoteright}ve offered to a project. On another level, communities can openly trace their research collectively through “Place” pages that document their efforts and local uses of Public Lab tools.",
year = "2014",
month = mar,
doi = "10.1080/01972243.2014.875783",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "30",
pages = "116--126",
journal = "Information Society",
issn = "0197-2243",
publisher = "Taylor and Francis Ltd.",
number = "2",
}