CoAct: Citizen Science is Social!
EU-Citizen.Science
Oct. 21, 2020, 3:40 p.m.
The international conference “Knowledge for Change: A decade of Citizen Science (2020-2030) in support of the SDGs” took place on the 14th and 15th of October 2020 in Berlin to present, evaluate and discuss the exciting contributions that citizen science makes in framing and achieving sustainable development, specifically the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). For the conference, CoAct and SoCis co-organised the Citizen Science is Social! evening event on the 14th.
The evening had hands-on activities, debates and was the perfect setting to feature the testimonials from Citizen Social Science (CSS) practitioners, who responded to our call for videos.
CoAct is a project funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. We are working towards a new understanding of the unexplored field of CSS, a participatory research approach co-designed and directly driven by citizen groups sharing a social concern, in which they become co-researchers. CSS aims to bring together, and further develop, methods to give citizen groups an equal ‘seat at the table’ through active participation in academic research, from the design to the interpretation of the results and their transformation into concrete actions.
Together with civil society organizations, we wish to frame the field of CSS and to build an international community of practice. A first step to do this is to ensure that a CSS approach evolves from the needs and relevance of and for the practitioner community. Therefore, we invited civil society practitioners (NGO´s, grassroots movements, local communities, activists), to share their experiences, needs and projects with us through a call for videos and to answer different questions:
What does CSS mean for you?
What would you need to make a CSS approach meaningful to you?
How would an ideal CSS community of practitioners from civil society and academia look like?
We selected 12 testimonials from CSS practitioners from Belgium, Spain, Germany, Chile, Italy, India, United Kingdom, Malta, Portugal and France. They were featured at the evening event Citizen Science is Social on the 14th of October and on the new community platform of the CoAct website. Listen to what they have to say by accessing their testimonials here https://coactproject.eu/overview/.