Agrita Dandriyal on the gift in community-based citizen science

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 knowledge and agency, for both the human and more-than-human.

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