Journal Articles

The Ecosystem Approach in Addressing Sustainable Development Goals through Citizen Science in Lithuania

This article presents an overview of the ecosystem of citizen science development in Lithuania and its potential to address United Nations sustainable development goals (SDGs). As citizen science is still in the early development stage in Lithuania, this case study is an example of ecosystem analysis in the period of early citizen science adoption.

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Journal Articles

Young Participation: Creativity and Conflict in Planning

How should we go about collaborating with children and adolescents? Young Participation: Creativity and Conflict in Planning explores how youth participation work in practical terms in the context of urban development processes at the municipal level in Norway. From their unique perspectives, social scientists, artists, an architect, and a young contributor discuss experiences and dilemmas of including children, teens, and young adults as contributing stakeholders in various projects. The reader will find concrete examples of participatory processes and tools developed in cooperation. The book is written in Norwegian but provides one chapter in English.

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Journal Articles

Engaging Communities in Citizen Science

How can Citizen Science (CS) be engaging? What does engagement entail? Who needs to be engaged? What are the challenges and opportunities of engagement in CS? After two years of lockdown and isolation, these were some of the questions debated by engaged researchers, students, and practitioners at the ‘Engaging Citizen Science Conference 2022’ at Aarhus University, Denmark. This review published in the Journal of Science Communication provides a summary of the conference.

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Journal Articles

Articulating Voices of the Young: How to bring youth into contemporary planning and governance?

The article describes the experience of involving young people in two youth participatory research projects on political and social engagement. These research projects are both focused on municipalities in the southern part of the Stockholm region and focus on the methods used to engage representative groups of young people in interdisciplinary research in the context of spatial planning and local politics. The article presents preliminary results and compares and contrasts the types of problems identified by the young people who participated in these projects in relation to their living environments and neighborhoods.

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Journal Articles

Citizen science in the making: mapping participatory science projects in Hungary

This article concludes that YouCount, as one of the 7 social science projects out of 28 citizen science projects in Hungary, goes beyond the level of passive, minimal involvement, where volunteers can meaningfully participate in the research process and bring about changes in their environment and communities. Local case studies of the projects Community Archaeology, Citizen Science Mentoring, Creek Rákos citizen science project, Life in undies, PET bottles spotting, Air working group, and YouCount are succeeding in involving certain communities in the research process in ways in which participants could contribute to framing the research questions, creative research outputs as well as publications or dissemination of research results.

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Journal Articles

Participatory Communication and Citizen Social Science: Lessons Learned and New Ethical and Political Challenges

This paper contributes to the discussion around the epistemic foundations of citizen social science (CSS) by drawing from participatory communication. We argue that the latter’s long history reflecting on the ethical and political challenges that emerge from its dialogical perspective to empowerment and social change could enhance the nascent CSS concept. In establishing that relation, we also explore how CSS can further develop participatory communication. To that end, we look into YouCount, an ongoing CSS project that, from its inception, has understood dialogical communication as inextricably linked to the research process. Our main findings are that: (i) old challenges related to the instrumental use of participatory communication are relevant to CSS; (ii) CSS offers a space to transcend entrenched narratives around knowledge production and communication that hindered the participatory communication paradigm; and, (iii) CSS has the potential to expand participatory communication’s scope through its use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) but faces important challenges related to research control of personal data and disclosure.

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Journal Articles

YouCount: Action Research and Citizen Social Science (Guest editorial by Patricia Canto Farachala and Reidun Norvoll) International Journal of Action Research

How can citizen social science contribute to addressing one of the three edges of action research (AR) identified by Larrea (2022) as the stagnation of global democratisation? And how can action research’s long tradition creating spaces where researchers and practitioners work together in a shared commitment to democratic social change (Brydon-Miller et al., 2003) inform the nascent citizen social sciences field? The three articles included in the thematic series on the YouCount project in the International Journal of Action Research show how action research and citizen social science can be combined in different social contexts with different purposes and can strengthen democratic social change. Moreover, by directly involving citizens, particularly young people that find themselves at risk of exclusion, they offer clues on the challenges of creating inclusive environments as a prerequisite for democratic social change.

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Journal Articles

Slow science and “caring” research – the transformative power of collaborative research with hard of hearing youths | Mihók | IJAR – International Journal of Action Research (budrich-journals.de)

In this paper we explore the transformative power of a collaborative research on our own academic perceptions and functions. We have been working with hard of hearing youths since the autumn of 2021 in Szeged (Hungary) in a social citizen science case study within the YouCount project to increase social inclusion in the city. During the process, we, authors of this paper, as senior hearing academics, identified significant aspects where our academic functions led to inner transformations. These experiences led us to recognize the overwhelming importance of relational aspects and caring, the perceived and fostered “slowness” of the research. Inclusion can be viewed as a joint and interdependent transformation of all actors involved towards the defragmentation of community.

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