ABSTRACT
National Science Foundation funding to work with those volunteer-collected data, jumping in on a project defined by volunteers in a reversal of the typical power dynamics of citizen science. Other academics are attempting to democratize knowledge production by bringing lay people into substantive roles in setting research agendas, collecting data, and interpreting its results via approaches such as participatory action research (Pain et al. 2012), participatory statistics (https://developmentbookshop.com/whocounts, last accessed 20 May 2014), and Extreme Citizen Science (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/excites, last accessed 20 May 2014). Thus, even the strongly hierarchical current practices of citizen science could be becoming more horizontal. The key factor in these democratizing trends is academics’ willingness to endorse and promote the legitimacy of extramural knowledge production.
