ABSTRACT
As the notion of citizen science (CS) has developed within the natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities, researchers and practitioners have concentrated on scientific or educational outcomes, and on the partnership between academia and society. The “citizens” in citizen science, however, have been under-theorized. A variety of terms are used to describe citizens, including volunteers, participants, amateurs, lay people, and lay scientists, as well as users, publics, and audiences. This chapter focuses on three terms – users, publics, and audiences – and considers how these terms, far from being interchangeable, reflect distinct conceptions of citizens from the fields of innovation studies, science and technology studies, and media studies. Each concept describes which spaces citizens access and how they access them; how citizens interact with each other socially and communicatively; and how we think about participation. We argue, therefore, that the concepts of users, publics, and audiences can extend recent discussions that link participation in CS to the terms used to refer to people, or to citizens who are involved. It is furthermore important to remember that scientists are also citizens, and that they partake in different constructions of users, publics, and audiences.
