#70 Agrita Dandriyal on the gift in community-based citizen science
“One of my research questions was actually asking if volunteers feel empowered as knowledge-producers because I was looking at citizen science initiatives. The answer to that question would be it’s not that volunteers feel particularly empowered by labels or roles like ‘knowledge-producer’ or gift-giver’. They feel empowered from being able to contribute and fulfil their responsibilities as stewards by taking part in these projects that give them that freedom to carry out their responsibility, so that they have their ownership over their actions. ”
How can we mainstream relational and care-based environmental policy paradigms as a way to radically transform and heal our moral and political systems which control environmental decision-making in overly legalistic and abstract ways? What power does using the care-informed gift economic framing to conceptualise volunteer-led citizen science hold for locals, who have deeply intimate and often generational relationships with the land, for bringing them to the centre of decision-making for their environment?
Today we are joined by the host Agrita Dandriyal to explore the wonderful research she got to conduct over the summer on the gift in volunteer-led citizen science as part of her MSc in Environment, Politics and Society. By using the moral framing of the gift economy and a case study example of a London wildlife group, Agrita demonstrates to us how the embodied experiences, situated biographies and moral responsibilities of stewardship of volunteers intermesh to form the fabric of environmental caregiving that provides the space for bottom-up initiatives to thrive and empower local expertise, knowledge and agency, for both the human and more-than-human.
What will be covered:
Agrita’s personal experience of the gift economy as an immigrant, and how this inspired her research
Extending Robin Wall Kimmerer’s conception of “reciprocity as currency” for the gift economy in Braiding Sweetgrass to volunteer-led citizen science in order to explore the relational and social dimensions of environmental caregiving
Exploring tensions between volunteering and reciprocity
Walking through the academic lineage of the gift and how it has been developed into a feminist-informed framework
Applying the logic of care into the gift framing, with particular emphasis on moral responsibility to be caring citizens
Explanation of the multi-method approach used for the study
Detailed explanation of the three key themes which emerged in the data: an ecosystem of caregiving, agency and moral responsibility, and reciprocity and balancing caregiver needs
Emphasis on the personal and ‘informal’ relationships and partnerships of the volunteer group which allow for healthy caregiving, gifting and stewardship
What the emotional geographies of environmental volunteering reveal about the role of volunteer lifestories and ways of life in sustaining the volunteer network in the borough
Raising the question of who is enabled to carry out their stewardship responsibilities and who is left out of environmental work e.g. disabled, ethnic minorities, low-income peoples
Bridging ‘self’ and ‘other’ in selfless cultural practices like volunteering
Resources:
Gift circulation in institution-led citizen science (Hetland, 2020)
Braiding Sweetgrass (Kimmerer, 2013)
Reciprocity and volunteering (Manatschal and Freitag, 2014)
Mauss’ conception of the gift (Mauss, 2002)
Vaughan’s work in feminising the gift (Vaughan, 1997)
Indigenous gift epistemes (Lange, 2010)
Enlived geographies of volunteering (Smith et al., 2010)
Volunteer motivations in citizen science (Robinson et al., 2021)
Relationships people have with place (Kruger and Shannon, 2010)
The ‘doing’ of environmental volunteering (Townsend, 2006)
The emotional and embodied experiences in environmental volunteering (Muirhead, 2016)
*If you have any access issues, please reach out via the contact form and a PDF of the paper can be sent to you.
