Ethnoracial discrimination and stigmatization are difficult to grasp both in everyday life and in research, as they are often hidden behind naturalizations or justified with different rationales and intersectional categories. By involving people with different horizons of knowledge and experience in the analytical process, the Top Citizen Science project aims to deepen the sociological understanding of ethnoracial exclusion including the perspectives and interpretations of citizen scientists – thus expanding the interpretations of the academic researchers.

We organise interpretive workshops in which non-sociologically trained persons (who in part are themselves potentially affected by racism and ethnic discrimination) will participate. The aim of these workshops is, on the one hand, to contribute to a better understanding of racism by bringing a variety of perspectives into the analysis and thus opening the scope of interpretation by developing and discussing potentially more diverse and complex readings and interpretations. Thereby, we assume that research should be conceived as a communicative process and that the multiplication of perspectives fosters knowledge production. Also, we assume that this approach fosters the critical reflection of us researchers in regard to the embeddedness of research in racialized societal structures. On the other hand, the participants in the interpretation workshops should also benefit individually from the participation in the Citizen Science project by experiencing empowerment through a (deeper) understanding of structural discrimination mechanisms. We assume that the active participation of citizens can improve the quality of research and increase its social relevance. In general, we offer the participants the opportunity to participate in different phases of the research process, including the planning and implementation of the presentation of results at the end of the project.

The proposed extension project has great potential to make an innovative contribution to methodological development, as the involvement of citizens in interpretation workshops is still exceptional in qualitative social research. Also, we aim to contribute to a better understanding of ethnoracial exclusion, as knowledge created in fundamental research can serve as a basis for anti-racism policies. Moreover, the main target group of CEE migrants is still largely unexplored in terms of racism.

Article about the Project: FWF Newsletter