Joke Kenens

Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) has been a central pillar of the European H2020 research framework. A social lab organized within the European project NewHoRRIzon explored ways to stimulate further integration of RRI principles (public engagement, open access, gender, ethics, science education) in the nuclear research. Under the title “Nuclear Dating”, a pilot action was designed in this lab with the aim of creating awareness of RRI among Early Career Researchers, providing a venue for experimenting interdisciplinary collaborations and stimulating their reflexivity to the wider social, ethical, and environmental issues surrounding their research. Through a joint effort of organizers and participants, this paper shares insights from this first of a kind event in the nuclear R&D landscape.

This article explores and discusses understandings of citizen science with members of Japanese citizen radiation measuring organizations who began measuring radioactive contamination in food, soil, air, and human bodies after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident. Building on in-depth interviews with organization members and extensive multi-site fieldwork (2018, 2020), the article takes shimin kagaku (citizen science in Japanese) to examine articulations of citizenship and science, while discussing citizen radiation measuring organization activities. Adopting Tsing’s notion of nonscalability, it draws attention to the manifold articulations of citizenship and science, unearthing frictions embedded in Japanese science–society relations. In this way, this article outlines the diversity of notions of citizenship and science, and of citizen participatory practices in science. By bringing nonscalability to bear on an analysis of different articulations of shimin kagaku, this article encourages scientists and public authorities to engage with citizen participatory practices reflexively and responsibly by considering local articulations and knowledges.

Although bottom-up citizen science in the field of radiation monitoring is not a new phenomenon, the organizations established in the wake of the Fukushima accident exceed preceding organizations in numbers, in space and in data production. Almost 10 years after the Fukushima nuclear accident, citizen radiation measuring organizations continue their activities stressing the importance of transparency, education and participation, despite the issues they are facing. Drawing on research on citizen science and results from fieldwork conducted in Japan, this paper reflects on the evolution of grassroots citizen science initiatives, contrasting their activities in the immediate aftermath of the Fukushima disaster to present day. By showing how some organizations have grown and others faded away, it demonstrates the intertwining and flexibility of citizen science initiatives in addressing concerns and needs expressed by local communities.

This study illustrates how citizen-driven radiation monitoring has emerged in post-Fukushima Japan, where citizens generate their own radiation data and measurement devices to provide public with actionable data about their environments. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in and around Fukushima Prefecture, it highlights the multifaceted character of these bottom-up, citizen-led efforts, contrasting these initiatives with the emergence of “citizen participatory” science policy discourses in Japan. Recognizing the contested nature of citizenship in Japan and in the nuclear arena, the article considers how terms and definitions shape the participation of citizens and other stakeholders (local communities, public authorities, regulators, and professional scientists) in science and technology in culturally and historically specific ways. It builds on these observations to open up new spaces of expertise, which engage all stakeholders through social-scientific intervention.