Dr Eugénia Rodrigues
Sabbatical Fellow, August- December 2026
Home Institution: University of Edinburgh
Dr Eugénia Rodrigues works in the Science, Technology and Innovation Studies subject area of the School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh. Her research, and much of her teaching, focus on novel forms of public participation in science and technology and their implications for science governance, expertise, open science, and the democratisation of knowledge. She is particularly interested in developing new ways to connect citizen participation, knowledge production, and policy implementation in order to identify innovative responses to major societal challenges. A significant strand of her work examines these issues in the context of environmental and climate challenges. She was co-director of SKAPE (the Centre for Science, Knowledge and Policy at Edinburgh) from 2022 to 2025 and Programme Director of the MSc Science and Technology in Society from 2021 to 2025. Overlapping with her IASH Fellowship, Eugénia will be an EFI (Edinburgh Futures Institute) Fellow working to strengthen multidisciplinary research collaborations across SHAPE and STEMM.
Project title: Infrastructures of knowledge-making and digital participation in biodiversity and nature conservation
At IASH, Eugénia will investigate the epistemic affordances of digital platforms in biodiversity and nature conservation with the aim of developing a research proposal on this topic. Digital platforms for public participation have gone through a process of rapid expansion in recent decades and are now an integral part of the wider societal infrastructure of knowledge-making and governance. New technological capabilities enable their replication and adaptation, broaden citizen participation, and diversify the types of data collected, for example. In biodiversity and nature conservation, these platforms also support data validation, increasing the value of citizen-generated data for scientific research and policy. Yet despite extensive research on these digital ways of knowing, their epistemic affordances remain underexplored. Many of their properties and design features are opaque or ‘black-boxed’, even though back-end processes shape users’ material engagement with platforms and the epistemic quality of that relationship. This project unpacks these systems by tracing configurations of knowledge, data circuits, and infrastructuring work. Ultimately, it interrogates the democratic promise often associated with digital platforms and citizen participation.