China’s Air Pollution Meets Citizen Science
* Article: China’s Air Pollution Meets Public Participation and Citizen Science. by Rodolfo Hernández-Pérez. Journal of Peer Production, Issue #14: Infrastructuring the commons today, when STS meets ICT ·
Abstract
"This article discusses how China’s new era of air pollution control provoked groups of urban residents and nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) to adopt citizen science and strategies for disseminating technoscientific knowledge. Since 2008, their actions have included sharing photographic records, posting scientific evidence online, testing air purifiers and air pollution masks, and reporting data results from low-cost sensors. Interviews with the leaders of these initiatives show the changing patterns of pollution activism and engagement in the country, appealing to civic and resistance approaches to technoscientific knowledge and practices. Following and articulating recent works on STS about citizen science as resistance and Chinese studies on pollution activism, this article presents the civic adoption of scientific knowledge and technological devices as instrumental to activists but also problematic to navigate in the complex participative context of the country. The dynamism of the actions, first marked by the mistrust of official data and then expanding to other agendas, brings about a novel approach to resistance in the context of the environmental health crisis in China."