On a Saturday morning down by the Duwamish River, Thuy and I gather berries: thimbleberry, snowberry, Oregon grape, Himalayan blackberry. I like to think I know my Pacific Northwestern berries, but Thuy, majoring in horticulture at UW, points out a new plant behind me: honeysuckle. We collect several of the glossy black berries and return to the river’s edge, making our way down a narrow ramp to the floating dock.
Thuy is a community scientist with the Green Futures Lab, meaning we’ll work side by side today, setting up traps for invertebrates on the BioBarges tethered to the dock. To begin our morning, we take a few moments to orient ourselves, offering our bright berries to the current as we greet the river, the histories it carries, and the ways we are engaging in deep relational work with its ecosystems. Here, science is community.
This summer, I've been able to meet new community scientists every week—a growing constellation of UW students, local high schoolers, and Duwamish Valley residents. Some of our community scientists already work in the sciences or are studying to enter STEM fields, while others have no affiliation with scientific work outside of their experiences with us. Regardless of their scientific background, these community members become scientists when they’re out with us on the river, helping to observe fish, collect invertebrate samples, measure plants, and more.
In working with these community members each week, I’ve begun to reflect more deeply on the boundaries and edges of science, particularly when it comes to the necessity of collective, collaborative scientific work. And in doing so, I’m compelled to consider the tension between "community science" and its more widespread counterpart, "citizen science." Transitioning to the former has become a growing conversation within the scientific sphere, especially in the context of equity and inclusion; there's also much to be said about the shift in framing from the individual to the collective. In some ways, this tension is the perfect framing as I continue to think about the roles of language and definition, both as they’ve come up with my experience with science and in the greater sphere of what it means to do science.
To backtrack, I've been a self-identified birder (read: person who watches birds) for about four years now. Ask anyone who knew me as a senior in high school, and they'll tell you that when I wasn't at the Burke Museum learning how to taxidermy songbirds, I was out exploring the parks of King County in search of their living counterparts.
Part of my fascination with birding centered around "listing:" compiling detailed observations of the number of species and individuals I had seen during a trip in order to enter them in an online database called eBird. Run by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, eBird fits into the category of what's broadly been known as "citizen science"—a way for ordinary people to engage with scientific research by providing data points through their own recreational engagement with, for example, birds.
When I first made my eBird account, back in 2017, I loved the idea of citizen science, of being able to contribute to long-term data sets in a meaningful way while doing something I found enjoyable. As someone just beginning to build their relationship with science, it felt like the perfect place to start. But now, coming up on my fourth and final year studying biology as an undergrad, I'm circling back to the concept of citizen science, reevaluating its framing in the same way I've begun to reflect on science more critically.
More and more, one of my deepest fascinations with science—in the westernized sense, as I've begun to confront the ways western science has acted as a tool of colonization, supplanting older scientific knowledge systems—is the intrinsic power it bestows upon language. Western science, so fixated on precision and accuracy, seeks to define our world in objective terms (what bird species did you see? how many?). It reduces natural phenomena, entities, and individuals to data points. And so often, that is, in fact... the point. In the process, language becomes a vehicle—no, a container—to compartmentalize and categorize the world around us. The stories of our planet are broken down into digestible sound bites. In the scientific context, then, language is everything.
I recently read an article titled "For a People-Centered Science: A Call to Action," in which Shannon Dosemagen, co-founder and director of Public Lab, critiques the language of "citizen science." So often, she argues, this framing centers the science advanced by professional researchers, which rarely is directly focused on solving or addressing community concerns—for instance, while my contributions to eBird have (hopefully) helped researchers build migratory maps, identify key habitat for certain species, and expand a global database, I would be hard put to point out how my efforts have directly returned to my local community. Plus, "citizen" science fails to include numerous members of our communities whose citizenship status has no bearing on their ability to contribute to ongoing research.
That's why organizations like Public Lab call for a more people-centered and -driven science—for community science, which refers to community-led advocacy around local issues of environmental and public health through data collection and analysis. Notably, this language shift situates each contributing community member within a larger network, reframing the focus from the individual to the collective.
In the context of the Green Futures Lab, our community scientists fall somewhere between the two categories. Though these individuals are contributing to a university-led, research-team-directed scientific endeavor, the GFL's work is ultimately aimed at improving the socioecological health of the Duwamish River and its connected communities. And, as our community scientists help measure plants, monitor fish, and collect invertebrates, they are given the opportunity to deepen their relationship with the river, returning over many weeks to a place so close to home. They have the chance to build a relationship with the GFL team, too—a reciprocity far more meaningful and overt than my interactions with the eBird website.
I wonder how useful the term "citizen science" remains—should there be another term to acknowledge the distinction between research-driven and community-driven science? Or should we move towards using "community science" as a catch-all for local involvement in scientific research projects? How important is it that we give the right labels to our work—is this just reproducing our need to categorize in a way that detracts from the big picture?
These are just some of the questions I'm considering as I work through my understanding of community science in the context of GFL as well as the role language plays in science. I think more than anything, I want our definitions, labels, and categories to hold breathing space, to remember that they contain living beings, whether that be ourselves, nonhuman organisms, or entities like our lands and waters. I want "community science" to feel important not because it is more accurate, but because it builds a welcoming, expansive home for all people within the landscape of what it means to do science.
In my work this summer, I’ve attempted to generate more flux in the language of science, reconstructing stories about the beings described and involved by taking apart the mechanisms of data collection, analysis, and summary. Why shouldn't the river have a say, too? In dissolving some of these confines, I want science to feel like storytelling, like poetry, like a conversation with many voices. Like community.
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