Slam the Data! Exploring the Role of Poetry in Integrating Citizens Into a Citizen Science Project

The ECODOC project engages citizens through slam poetry workshops on forest ecology, promoting dialogue, knowledge sharing, and participatory democracy.

The ECODOC citizen science project asked itself how citizens could be truly integrated into the project. We hypothesized that engagement depended on the possibility of appropriating the subject, of allowing for a personal and unique interpretation that would enable participants to grasp it according to their own concerns. Our aim was therefore to encourage the expression of all existing points of view on the research topic, to reject asymmetries of power and knowledge (Owen, 2023), and ultimately to engage our project in a form of dialogical democracy (Callon et al., 2014).

Because the relationship between the arts and sciences has long shown that their synergies play a social role in both scientific transmission and the renewal of the imagination, we decided to use poetry as a tool for reformulating the scientific narrative, enabling the encounter and dialogue between emotions, ideas, and knowledge. To this end, we have set up, in partnership with the slam association Street Def Records, “science slam” writing workshops and invited participants to write slam texts based on the research data of forest ecology researchers as a prerequisite for joint research work on access to scientific information on forests.

This poster is an opportunity to present these scientific data slam workshops and share the initial results in terms of collective creation.