Co-creating knowledge in transdisciplinary art and climate science collaborations: Exploring epistemic justice in applied methods and procedures

Transdisciplinary collaborations between art and climate science aim to co-create knowledge to strive for climate and ecological justice. This research explores developed and applied methods and procedures that promote epistemic justice between artists, climate scientists, societal actors, and the more-than-human to avoid marginalising knowledge and contribute to social justice. That means collaborations strive to co-create knowledge to increase climate and ecological justice, but the co-creation processes are not necessarily practised just and on eye level. Thus, the main research question concerns how to reach epistemic justice in terms of knowledge co-creation regarding the climate crisis between artists, climate scientists, society, and the more-than-human in art and climate science transdisciplinary collaborations through uncovering underlying assumptions and dynamics and investigating just, participatory, and pluralistic methodologies, practices, and processes. The research aims to answer this based on the three interdependent types of knowledge in transdisciplinary research. System knowledge describes the current state of the problem, followed by the target knowledge referring to the desired future scenario development based on values, norms, and system knowledge, and finally, transformation knowledge deals with initiating the actual change and how to turn system and target knowledge into practice (Buser & Schneider, 2021). Combining the concepts of ecological art, transdisciplinarity, and climate and ecological justice provides the research framework. Drawing on qualitative and transdisciplinary research methods by applying participatory interviews, participant observation, focus group discussions, actor constellation, and storywall in the context of Switzerland, I will suggest emerging challenges, issues, and inspirations in transdisciplinary collaboration processes. The case studies will provide examples from which priorities of some practices over others through reflection can be observed, which can help conduct future art and climate science transdisciplinary research projects. Recognising present power dimensions in collaborations and inter- and intrapersonal dynamics is crucial in the context of art, ecology, the environment, and marginalised knowledge on a societal, political, and scientific level.