CFP AAA 2014: Producing Anthropology, Producing Science: Citizen Science and Emerging Problematics
Many of the challenges facing anthropology today have their parallels in the emerging citizen science sphere. Anthropologists have long conceptualized, and re-conceptualized, the permeable boundaries of knowledge production, but new challenges emergent within citizen science mark a changing landscape where new forms of knowledge production and dissemination are reworking scientific boundaries long considered stable. Professional scientists are addressing new audiences in new contexts, including in new economies of knowledge production, moving beyond binary distinctions between internal and external discourses, and engaging new modes (open access) and media (online scholarly publishing, blogging, and micro-blogging) to disseminate knowledge.
These wider audiences include amateurs, who both challenge and contribute to professional knowledge by creating new modes of production. Challenging the boundaries between professionals and publics, citizen science is a site engaging many of these challenges and illustrating these changes. This panel seeks to address these challenges and changes through the lens of citizen science, broadly understood. We address several questions, including: What challenges are posed to, and changes are occurring in, how scientific knowledge is produced? How has the emergence of citizen science accelerated or slowed these changes? In what ways does citizen science engage or overlap with the scientific theories, methods, or projects of anthropology? Considering citizen science as a site of socialization, education, and knowledge production can help us challenge the epistemological commitments of anthropology and subsequently refigure the kinds of partnerships that might be formed, expand the audience for anthropological work, and illuminate possibilities unique to anthropology.
Please email producinganthropology@gmail.com with a 250 word abstract by March 31st, 2014.
Michael Scroggins. PhD Candidate, Teachers College Columbia University
Ashley Rose Kelly, Assistant Professor, Brian Lamb School of Communication, Purdue University
