The many Modes of Citizen Science

This special issue of Science and Technology Studies is concerned with the epistemological and ontological diversity of citizen science, and the sometimes contested attempts to define it, as an interesting and fruitful phenomenon to explore from vantage points or perspectives in STS. During the past two decades there has been an increasing interest in this phenomenon, and currently citizen science is being introduced as a way to change the very landscape and culture of science. However, in contrast to such general accounts, this special issue seeks to unpack citizen science, and instead approach it not as one, but as several different modes of social epistemologies. These diverse modes also instantiate a wide range of imagined epistemic agents; ‘the citizen’, ‘the volunteer’, ‘the participant’, ‘the crowd’, ‘the activist’, ‘the community’ et cetera - agents that in one way or another perform scientific research without being a professional scientist.