Abstract
There is a disconnect between ambition and achievement of the UN Agenda 2030 and associated Sustainable Development Goals that is especially apparent when it comes to ocean and coastal health. While scientific knowledge is critical to confront and resolve contradictions that reproduce unsustainable practices at the coast and to spark global societal change towards sustainability, it is not enough in itself to catalyse large scale behavioural change. People learn, understand and generate knowledge in different ways according to their experiences, perspectives, and culture, amongst others, which shape responses and willingness to alter behaviour. Historically, there has been a strong connection between art and science, both of which share a common goal to understand and describe the world around us as well as provide avenues for communication and enquiry. This connection provides a clear avenue for engaging multiple audiences at once, evoking emotion and intuition to trigger stronger motivations for change. There is an urgent need to rupture the engrained status-quo of disciplinary divisions across academia and society to generate transdisciplinary approaches to global environmental challenges. This paper describes the evolution of an art-science collaboration (Catching a Wave) designed to galvanise change in the Anthropocene era by creating discourse drivers for transformations that are more centred on society rather than the more traditional science-policy-practice nexus.
Highlights
The world is at a turning point for sustainable development and there is an evolving need to identify and enact new pathways to action in the face of constantly shifting biophysical and social realities (Randers et al, 2018)
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have been used to galvanize, among others, the role of youth and innovation (Bastien and Holmarsdottir, 2017), engagement with industry and business (Scheyvens et al, 2016; Weber, 2018), sports (Lemke, 2016), and gender equality (Fredman et al, 2016). This suggests that actors within both community and political spheres are attempting to take advantage of the holistic and optimistic appeal of the SDGs to stimulate social action (McAfee et al, 2019)
This paper examines a process to build an inter- and transdisciplinary art-science collaboration to create such opportunities to elucidate a mechanism that can galvanize change by creating discourse drivers for transformations that are more centered on society rather than the more traditional science-policy-practice nexus
Summary
The world is at a turning point for sustainable development and there is an evolving need to identify and enact new pathways to action in the face of constantly shifting biophysical and social realities (Randers et al, 2018). Transdisciplinarity provides an opportunity to capture the creativity of art to bring cultural capital to science in the context of Snow’s (1956) two-cultures debate (Sleigh and Craske, 2017) to address the increasingly complex challenges confronting sustainable development (Bernstein, 2015; Zafeirakopoulos and van der Bijl-Brouwer, 2018), currently framed by the UN 2030 Agenda (United Nations, 2015) This re-imagination is rooted in Barry et al.’s efforts to identify art-science collaborations through the lens of three logics of interdisciplinarity: accountability, innovation, and ontology (Barry et al, 2008; Born and Barry, 2010) where (i) accountability refers to the way in which scientific research is increasingly required to make itself accountable to society, (ii) innovation draws attention to scientific research needing to fuel industrial or commercial innovation and economic growth, and (iii) ontology discusses provoking change in both the object(s) of research, and the relations between research subjects and objects. This contextualized, localized and social understanding of the Anthropocene, sensitive to global inequalities and disparities, can contribute to new insights into global and local interconnectivities relevant to the delivery of the SDGs and other international conventions (e.g., the New Urban Agenda, Paris-COP21, and the Convention on Biological Diversity)
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