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Bundenthal, Samuel

University of British Columbia

Citizen science offers a unique opportunity to reconcile relational and substantive definitions of environmental expertise within STS scholarship. Additionally, because significant overlap exists between the work done by citizen scientists and environmental stewards, it may be prudent to incorporate environmental stewardship as a framework through which to understand citizen scientists, and, by extension, their capacity as environmental experts. As environmental expertise rests upon the ecological knowledge of a specific place, I conducted a six-month long participatory ethnographic study as a volunteer with the Pacific Spirit Park Society, a nonprofit organization of volunteer environmental stewards and citizen scientists in Pacific Spirit Regional Park in Vancouver, B.C. I also combined qualitative, semistructured interviews of my fellow volunteers with my own autoethnographic account of restoration and interpretation work to illustrate the process by which volunteers developed varying levels of expertise in regards to local ecological knowledge. Interlocutors also considered their responsibilities to both human and nonhuman members of their community, negotiated their own responsibilities as interpreters of ecological knowledge to the lay public, and reflected on how their lived experiences as boundary workers contrasted with traditional institutional epistemologies of science. I found that while there were volunteers who served as nexuses of information, the transfer of knowledge from one person to another was never unilateral, and a person’s expertise always developed in concert with that of another. The act of interpreting knowledge so as to make it accessible for fellow volunteers as well as for the public helped recruit people for the mission of care and stewardship. The lens of stewardship likewise enhances STS analyses of citizen science by providing context for how knowledge is applied and carried by practitioners.

Text

2024-01-11

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/87223

Science and Technology Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/