Annual Impact of Science Conference, Leiden, the Netherlands

The Impact of Science Conference was held in Leiden — the 2022 City of Science — over 3 days and focused on stimulating societal impact of science by building stronger, long-term structures for knowledge and data exchange, as well as Public-Private collaboration. In his session, Dr. Tandon urged to bring forth a different lens to community engagement and citizen science – the lens of an ordinary citizen. Who are these citizens, and do they have any knowledge? Production of knowledge is the prime purpose of science, and it happens in several distinct spaces- labs and academia is only one location. 

It is important to note that communities in their everyday life also produces knowledge. If it was not the case, people would not have survived the pandemic. The fact that millions and millions of rural communities took care of themselves during the pandemic even where information about the pandemic and its remedies were not available, shows that they were relying on their own experiential as well as accumulated knowledge. Open Science declaration of UNESCO talks about providing recognition and value to multiple scientific system, knowledge systems and therefore it is important to recognise that these systems come form different knowledge cultures. The one that most of us are used to is the lab and academia culture.  

We do science in a particular way, that is the science that we have learnt over the 400 years. But there is a science that is going on in the community – the practice of agriculture, practice of water harvesting, practice of weaving clothes, practice of looking after the forest and trees were all developed outside the lab. Community’s knowledge cultures are embedded in the cultural context and communicated through their own language.  

When we talk about partnership, we must think about co-creation in all the various steps of knowledge production. The first step in knowledge production, is framing research questions, co-creation should start at that stage. Research questions should be framed in partnerships with communities and then data collection, analysis, and dissemination of findings. The research questions cannot be defined outside the realm of community. In order to do so, therefore, from framing to dissemination, integration of different knowledge cultures is required which in turn requires invention and use of multiple methods and tools. It is only then that community engagement will become a genuinely mutually respectful co-creation.  

AESIS_PPT_22 June