Enhancing social dimensions in citizen science: SDGs and social tipping points

The pursuit of sustainable goals entails substantial technological and scientific advancements. However, commitment and cooperation from vast segments of our societies is also required to turn the efforts into actions. Just a mention from a straightforward example: climate stabilization is not only a scientific and technological task, it also depends on activating processes of social change on several levels. An interesting concept to raise here is the social tipping point, which is a point where a group rapidly and dramatically changes its behavior by widely adopting a previously rare practice. The concept, taken from the field of behavioural sciences, has strongly emerged in climate literature but it is potentially of interest to face any other urgent societal challenge. Due to its participatory spirit, citizen science provides a framework to further reflect on the notion of social tipping point and integrate social dimensions into any specific SDG oriented research activities. Grounded on our current CoAct EU project, the presentation will discuss a general model for a citizen social science which offers communities, groups or individuals the possibility to directly intervene into scientific research and to then actively contribute to SDGs. Citizen social science engages citizen bodies concerned with specific social issues in co-research and imagines the possibility to support demands of the public with scientific evidence. The joint effort represents itself a way to reinterpret scientific practice, much closer to collective action and policy making and very much linked to public debate. The presentation will take experiences from contexts such as climate justice, mental health care provision, air pollution exposure, gender biased interactions in public spaces among others to encourage a further enhancement of social dimensions in citizen science practices if they want to more effectively support SDGs.