Abstract:

There are increasing calls among environmental educators for critically engaged citizens who are able to respond to wicked problems and ‘matters of concern’ now commonplace within the Anthropocene. However, the current system of validated knowledge production works to exclude citizens from knowledge work, thereby distancing citizens from the coherence, logic and systematic process of knowledge production, leaving them in relatively weak positions to engage with knowledge products critically. In this chapter, and drawing on a critical review of over 60 citizen science projects, I argue for a strengthening of epistemic cultures in ESE through citizen science practices that foreground the creation of situated and embodied knowledge. This, I argue, offers expansive, viable and robust alternatives to taken-for-granted institutional knowledge production practices. I invoke the work of Knorr Cetina to propose alternative, futures oriented epistemic cultures which integrate ‘ecologies of knowledge’ that are more appropriately suited to engaging citizens in critical knowledge production activities. I draw on the emergent relationships between knowledge production and critical engagement with situated environmental challenges to illustrate how these alternative frameworks might contribute to the reclamation of scientific inquiry as an act performed within the commons, towards the well-being and communal reframing of the commons.