Art-Science
The purpose of the TG is to explore the relationship between art, politics, imagination, and sustainability transitions. We investigate these intersections through literature, visual arts, sound, music, theatre, and more. We aim to foster an active and collaborative community to share ideas, create collaborative research opportunities, and organize online and in-person events.
While there is much agreement about the impact of climate change and the need for sustainability transitions, there is much less about how to facilitate transition or how to approach sustainability communication. Recent work has focused on the role of values, culture, and worldviews in an effort to engage the public more deeply in sustainability. However, perhaps we need to go further. What if, rather than changing our worldviews, we need to reimagine different worlds. The arts have long served this role in society and have been proposed as a way to connect sustainability and politics, recognising that they can provide a range of opportunities for sustainable transitions, from activating actors to addressing pressing issues to shifting power relations. The interacting global crises we face are rooted in the challenge of connecting across diverse perspectives and ideas, often set in opposition. It is therefore more important than ever to explore the potential role that art can play in opening up imagination around possible just and sustainable futures and bringing these into being.
Research questions we are investigating include How can we balance leveraging the power of the arts in sustainability transitions and avoid instrumentalizing the arts? What can art as a form of knowledge mean in the context of sustainability transitions? What can we learn from and through arts as transition scholars? How can we evaluate the impact of the arts in sustainability transitions? How can we “prove” the value of the arts to funders and the academic community while embracing the ephemeral and magical nature of the arts? How can we balance cognitive learning and sensory experience? What can we learn from arts-based approaches across communities, regions, and countries? How can the arts support justice in transitions through disruption and operating in terms of flows, disjunctures, and dynamic relations as resistance? Can the arts operate as a boundary object, facilitating epistemological and ontological explorations? How can art create transformative engagement with more-than human entities? What role art can play in pointing to more-than-human agency?
We welcome anyone interested in joining and contributing to the group. If you are interested in collaborating with the Art-Science group, please get in touch with Rana Divyarajsinh Yashvantsinh divyarajsinh.rana@manipal.edu, Valentin Fiala v.fiala@boku.ac.at; Merin Raju Jacob merinj@sun.ac.za, nur.yalcin@ugent.be, Vitaliy Soloviy vitaliy.soloviy@ait.ac.at, or Steve Williams stephengarywilliams@gmail.com
To join the mailing list, please email artsciencestrn@gmail.com (administrator: Steve Williams).
Activities of the group:
· Annual STRN conference sessions, other conference sessions, workshops, seminars
· Online exchange formats: webinars, social media
· Joint publishing: papers, special issues, edited volumes
· Contributions from and updates about the thematic group in the STRN newsletter
· Note we are still in the process of mapping out 2025 activities – please connect with us to contribute your ideas!