Dana Mahr

University of Geneva | UNIGE · Faculté des Sciences, Section de Biologie

In this article, I share an anecdote about citizen science and use it to reflect on this rapidly growing field of scientific activity, its funding, and its governance. The paper focuses particularly on the epistemic and social challenges that accompany increasing demands for professionalization and institutionalization of the Citizen Sciences.

This chapter explores new forms of intersectional and body-related, partially performative feminism that emerges in the current socio-political climate. Hence the neo-conservative climate in many parts of the world threatens to curtail women’s rights once again. New feminist movements are, on the one hand, rediscovering the body-related practices o...

The aim of this chapter is to investigate forms of scientific knowledge production that are only minimally influenced by western influences. An example of this is the radically localised Thai Baan research in the Mekong Delta which maps and monitors the complex ecological network of the Mekong Delta without the influence of Western scientists. Here...

In the context of the digitalisation of disease and health, self-help and health self-care are undergoing a profound transformation. This is particularly evident in the boom in so-called digital health networks, which collect health data from their users in return for providing a community of people with similar conditions. This chapter examines th...

This chapter asks why, on the one hand, science and technology are more successful than ever and permeate all areas of life, but why, at the same time, more and more people are losing confidence in science and technology. One answer is that both scientific training and popularisation have epistemically conservative foundations that correlate with n...

Chronic inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD) have recently been re-shaped as clinical conditions with a genetically determined susceptibility, adding genetic factors to the explanation of chronic autoimmune conditions of ultimately unknown origin. This shift emerged from the predominance of molecular and genetic approaches in the life sciences and res...

Dominant forms of contemporary big-data based digital citizen science do not question the institutional divide between qualified experts and lay-persons. In our paper, we turn to the historical case of a large-scale amateur project on biogeographical birdwatching in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to show that networked amateur rese...

Zusammenfassung Die häufig auftretenden chronisch entzündlichen Darmerkrankungen (CED) Morbus Crohn und Colitis ulcerosa sind in den letzten Jahren von vorher prototypisch psychosomatischen Krankheiten zu teilweise genetisch erklärbaren Krankheiten umgedeutet und in ein biomedizinisches Paradigma genetischer Suszeptibilität eingeordnet worden. CED...

Medizinische, wissenschaftliche, mediale und wirtschaftliche Akteure positionieren das menschliche Mikrobiom als einen zentralen Faktor individualisierter Gesundheitsvorsorge und therapeutischer Praxis im 21. Jahrhundert. Dieser Trend weckt in der Bevölkerung große Erwartungshaltungen, insbesondere bei Betroffenen von chronisch entzündlichen Darmer...

Since the late twentieth century, “citizen science” has become an increasingly fashionable label for a growing number of participatory research activities. This paper situates the origins and rise of the term “citizen science” and contextualises “citizen science” within the broader history of public participation in science. It analyses critically...

When it comes to genes, we consider them almost automatically as something that belongs exclusively to the spheres of science and biomedicine. We understand them as scientific concepts or treat them as epistemic objects—due to this, we describe them with an esoteric language using the vocabulary of “codes”, “traits”, “dispositions” or “susceptibili...

Was bedeuten ›Virtuelle Realität‹, Industrie 4.0, ›Künstliche Intelligenz‹ und nicht zuletzt das neueste Smartphone für die Zukunft unserer Gesellschaft? Debatten über technische Umwälzungen und damit einhergehende post-kapitalistische Perspektiven sind auch unter Linken von tiefen Ambivalenzen geprägt: Roboter gefährden Arbeitsplätze, könnten die...

For medical professionals, the genome is primarily a source of health information that can be used for diagnoses and disease risk assessment; in some cases, gene therapy is an option. For scientists, the genome is the DNA, which can be sequenced and used to explain heredity and individual development. But what is the genome for those who have it an...

Der Beitrag nimmt die im Jahr 2013 vorgelegten „Eckpunkte für eine Heidelberger Praxis der Ganzgenomsequenzierung“ der Projektgruppe EURAT zum Anlass, fünf verschiedene, gegenwärtig diskutierte Modelle zur Offenlegung von gesundheitsbezogenen Forschungsdaten an Studienteilnehmende zu untersuchen. Insbesondere werden die Verpflichtungen der Wissensc...

Citizen Science is often described as a genuine phenomenon of the democratization of science in the early 21st century. The book historicizes this movement and shows that public participation in science was already discussed in the late 19th and early 20th century. It also shows that the opportunities to participate went partially further in the kn...