De-“Banking” Citizen Research in a Postdigital Era: Postdigital Citizen Research as Critical Pedagogy

Postdigital citizen research represents an emerging field undergirded by critical pedagogical approaches that reject what Freire referred to as the “banking model” of education and research. We draw attention to how ‘the banking model’ can be applied to superficial forms of participation and dangerous appropriations of data from citizen researchers, exemplifying patterns in society more broadly. This calls for a significant rethink of unethical extraction models by universities and research funders, which contradicts their commitment to ethical research. We draw from a postdigital theoretical kaleidoscope to challenge the banking model of citizen research, and illuminate pathways towards more critical, participatory forms of knowledge production in postdigital society, particularly between citizen researchers and professional researchers, such as within university partnerships.