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Fieldnote Mar 7 2023 - 3:12pm

This fieldnote is about how to get information on what is transported via rail.  I emailed the Dept of Transportation, a federal agency.  My inquiry was forwarded to the Federal Railroad

San Diego 350

SanDiego350 is building a movement to prevent the worst impacts of climate change and climate injustice through education and outreach, public policy advocacy, and mobilizing people to take action.

National Nurses United (NNU)

National Nurses United (NNU) is the largest union and professional association of registered nurses in U.S. history with nearly 225,000 members across multiple states. 

National Nurses United

National Nurses United, with nearly 225,000 members nationwide, is the largest union and professional association of registered nurses in U.S. history.

Citizen science as a contested culturally specific term

lclplanche

This text argues that the umbrella term citizen science has come to describe a variety of organizations and structures that function in a very different way. Not only does the notion of citizen science cover a wide variety of situations, but the term itself makes references to different types of organizations and is not neutral. Japan had forms of "citizen science" which pre-existed the introduction of the English term, as heirs to the development of more engaged scientific practices by politically inclined scientists in the 1970s.

The tensions within the use of the term citizen science and its diverse embodiments take the form of the following: basically, the concept of citizen science in Japan is mostly used in the context of top-down participatory approaches. The organizations that emerged after the Fukushima disaster are much more varied than this and exist within a framework that had been previously developed in Japan. This framework included visions of participatory and democratic science making by citizens, for citizens, and of citizens. They are mostly local organizations that are sometimes but not always affiliated to a network. Some of them cooperate with more formal institutions, while others steer clear of any collaboration with formal science or governments, partly because there is a lot of distrust towards these institutions in Japan, especially since the Fukushima accident.

One of the pitfalls of the reputation that citizen science projects have in Japan is that they are associated with the anti-nuclear movement and are therefore associated with the far left. This causes a need for distantiation from any political association, which some of the organizations studied use.