ABSTRACT
Citizen science as a phenomenon takes place precisely in the area of tension between a largely self-contained science and the emerging public expectations of more participatory research. This chapter addresses the question to what extent citizen science has the potential to feed data and (detailed) content from lay people into science to contest scientific evidence. Altmann and Wenninger distinguish between existing typifications of participatory activities as modes of citizen science: Contributory, collaborative, collegiate and co-creation. The assumption is that the contributory and collaborative modes enable a quasi-silent assimilation into academia without extensive epistemic participation. The collegiate mode, on the other hand, has great potential for a contestation of evidence but cannot generate the necessary connectivity to academia. Co-creation, by contrast, offers the maximum opportunity to strike a balance between the input of extra-scientific knowledge and a certain connectivity to academia. The authors enrich their conceptual considerations with empirical cases from the field of citizen science. The chapter concludes that the benefits of participation unfold through the various connectivities of citizen science to academia. At the same time, the modes limit (to various degrees) the epistemic impact of lay participation to organize evidence contestation in a manageable way.
