C-Urge project is a doctoral network set up to research and better understand the complexity of climate and enviromental change, that is happening on global, as well as on a local scale.
Through various research approaches set in various countries, we aim to highlight the notion of urgency and need to enrich the debate around the topic of environemtal change, that is both fast, and subtle and poses a serious challenge for the future.
This memo will add some of my thoughts to Carlys memo which gives a great overview for the chemical valley case study.
Following the article, the author J. Kenens has published another paper "Changing perspectives: tracing the evolution of citizen radiation measuring organizations after Fukushima (2020)" DOI: 10.1051/radiopro/2020041 (link) that draws on the research on citizen science in Japan with a new focus on the comparison of their practices directly after the nuclear accident and today.
It is interesting to see how citizen science in Japan is enacted and how the concept of citizen science is dependent to the social and cultural context. Also looking at it not only from a top-down perspective, where universities or organizations are involved, but also the bottom-up perspective that includes only those practices that are done by citizens alone opens up a new space. As I am currently engaging with research on air pollution in different sites, I could build from this text in considering the link between "citizen-driven approaches and institutional imparatives in the governance" (p. 7) of issues with air pollution.
The text is an article about citizen science in the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster in 2011. The first noteworthy detail about this text that struck me is the inclusion of Japanese words and even their original spelling. This creates a kind of closeness to the field that the authors did their research in.
The authors engaged in multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork that took place in and around Fukushima but also in other geografical sites like Tochigi, Miyagi, Aichi, Tokyo and Kyoto. There, they conduct semi-structured interviews with various organisations that are all somehow involved with citizen science or radiation measurement. To learn about the citizens that measure radioactivity and create their own data on radiation because of a lack of provided data by the government, a literature review of policy documents and workshops with those citizen scientists is performed.
This slide pictures a brief timeline of developments in the Chemical Valley