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Citizen science in South Africa: Rhetoric and reality

Peter Weingart https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8275-525X and Corlia Meyer https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2965-4054 [email protected]View all authors and affiliations

Volume 30, Issue 5

https://doi.org/10.1177/0963662521996556

Abstract
References
Biographies

Abstract

Citizen science, and public engagement with science, has become prominent in science policy programmes. Given the expectations attached to citizen science in academic and science policy discourses, it is worthwhile to look at where the actual work is done. The case of South Africa, the study focus, is interesting because the country follows similar programmes as many developed countries, but has a socioeconomically and educationally more unequal society. Thus, South Africa presented a test example of whether the institutional similarities of science or socioeconomic and educational differences prevail in shaping the reality of citizen science. Results from 56 projects showed that nearly all of them were limited to data collection in life science fields and were managed largely by one university and mainly communicated within the respective science communities. This led us to conclude that the ambitious rhetoric accompanying citizen science in science policy programmes is not matched by reality.

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Biographies

Corlia Meyer received a Master of Science in Zoology, working with citizen science projects and received her PhD in Science and Technology. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Research on Evaluation, Science and Technology, Stellenbosch University, doing research on science communication practices in South Africa.

Peter Weingart is professor emeritus of Sociology, Sociology of Science and Science Policy at the University of Bielefeld. He was appointed to the SARChi Chair for Science Communication at Stellenbosch University in South Africa 2015–2020. He is editor-in-chief of the journal Minerva. His current research interests are science advice to politics, science – media interrelation, science communication, especially in the context of social media.

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