Managing the Boundaries of Citizen Science: Reordering Science–Society Relations

Today, science is expected to open up to publics and be more responsible. At the same time, the legitimacy and autonomy of academic work are increasingly challenged. Public participation in science constitutes a critical site of these ambivalent dynamics, while it also becomes questionable as an emancipatory practice and as an analytical concept. To examine these reconfigurations of science–society relations, this article proposes to study the doing and undoing of symbolic boundaries by bringing the concepts of boundary work, boundary objects, and boundary organizations closer together. Empirically, new insights are provided on citizen science as an emblematic approach that unites and reshapes diverse forms of participatory research. The analysis moves beyond single projects tracing three boundary management practices that propel the consolidation of citizen science at the field level: (1) rhetorically identifying as double promise of innovative science and societally useful participation; (2) infrastructuring collaboration among projects through adaptive qualification; and (3) organizing practitioners as a movement within institutions. The entanglements of those boundary practices give rise to the high connectivity as well as fragility of a field that currently emerges as a prototype of science–society relations.