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Getting Out of Their Way: Do-It-Yourselfers, Sensing, and Self-Reliance

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Book cover Participatory Sensing, Opinions and Collective Awareness

Part of the book series: Understanding Complex Systems ((UCS))

Abstract

In current practice the various social and environmental concerns of ‘lay-people’ or ‘non-experts’ are lumped together and their issues are objectified (Wynne 2007). Multiple constructions, including claims and counter-claims about what the public ‘really’ thinks and what the ‘real public’ might be is defined by prevailing institutionalised patterns of power and authority (Cunningham-Burley 2006; Irwin 2006; Marres 2005). Overshadowed by political discourse and by the fierce pressures on scientific institutions to deliver policy agendas that secure the interests of powerful global patrons, which are often justified as an endeavour for ‘the public good’, the stories of actual people have a limited voice (Lave 2012; Friedmann 1987). Under-representation renders their skills, hopes, and passions unimportant and hence, undervalued and underestimated. This inevitably leads to exclusion not only from the decision-making process but also from taking part in process of actively addressing the issue at stake (problem-solving).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Eymund Diegel, personal communication about the Gowanus Canal Conservancy’s Grassroots Mapping in New York.

  2. 2.

    Akin to Kelty’s (2005) idea of ‘argument-by-technology’.

  3. 3.

    Specifically his tutors Theodore W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer from the Frankfurt School.

  4. 4.

    Whereas money and power are the media for the system.

  5. 5.

    For example, the state’s arrangements take the shape of institutional strategies for public engagement and the customary reductionist top-down approach to managing social and biophysical systems.

  6. 6.

    A phenomenon that has also occurred in other practices such as the Arts.

  7. 7.

    See Irwin (2006), Wegener and Petty (1998), Friedman (1998), Ziman (1991) and Wynne (1992, 2006) for discussions about conceptions of ‘public ignorance’.

  8. 8.

    See Freudenburg (1993), Furnham (1992), Michael and Brown (2005), Eden (1998), Stilgoe (2007) and Barnett et al. (2010) for discussions on construction of ‘publics’ and public irrationality.

  9. 9.

    See De Boer et al. (2005), Burningham et al. (2007), Besley and Nisbet (2013), Bazelon (1981) and Shrader-Frechette (1990) for discussion on the public’s capacity to understand and engage with science.

  10. 10.

    DIYbio combines an open source ethos, with a DIY will to do things and the joy to mess with biological matter (Delgado 2013) outside of professional settings (Kuznetsov et al. 2012)—a creative proof of the hacker principle (Ledford 2010).

  11. 11.

    For a fuller review, discussions, and examples of DIY environmental sensing see Peterová and Hybler (2011), Heggen (2013), Gabrys (2012), D’Hondt et al. (2012) and Burke et al. (2006).

  12. 12.

    Petroleum coke is a byproduct of oil refining that is burned for fuel in countries where air standards are not as high as the United States (Eustis 2013).

  13. 13.

    Mapknitter is the online open source Public Lab platform for making maps from composite aerial images.

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  1. Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering, University College London, Gower St., London, WC1E 6BT, UK

    Cindy Regalado

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  1. Department of Physics, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy

    Vittorio Loreto

  2. Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering, University College London, London, United Kingdom

    Muki Haklay

  3. Julius-Maximilians-University Würzburg , Würzburg, Germany

    Andreas Hotho

  4. Department of Physics, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy

    Vito D.P. Servedio

  5. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Kassel, Kassel, Germany

    Gerd Stumme

  6. VITO—Flemish Institute for Technological Research, Mol, Belgium

    Jan Theunis

  7. Institute for Scientific Interchange Foundation, Torino, Italy

    Francesca Tria

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Regalado, C. (2017). Getting Out of Their Way: Do-It-Yourselfers, Sensing, and Self-Reliance. In: Loreto, V., et al. Participatory Sensing, Opinions and Collective Awareness. Understanding Complex Systems. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25658-0_14

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