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Meaningful Transdisciplinary Collaborations for Sustainability: Local, Artistic, and Scientific Knowledge

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Guest Editors: M. Azahara Mesa-Jurado, Paula Novo, Rafael Calderon-Contreras, Laura Pereira, Patricia Balvanera
This special feature aims to shed light into transdisciplinary collaborations in the field of sustainability transformations that have been co-designed from scratch by diverse teams, including arts, technology, social innovation, gastronomy leading that aim to be more meaningful and impactful. Learning from challenges, successes, and opportunities can enable transformative pathways and catalyze social change for sustainability. Transdisciplinary research is increasingly considered as crucial to address the complexity and urgency of global problems that conventional science has not been able to tackle. These approaches are critical to identify the most pressing sustainability issues that are relevant to specific social-ecological contexts, and explicitly to recognize and weave the multiple ways of knowing, doing, and feeling into understanding how to address these problems. A unique opportunity stems from transdisciplinary practice in collaborations between researchers and other partners as artists, chefs, beyond local to global stakeholders. However, these partnerships have been based on a “service-providing role” by artists, creatives, and chefs, who have been conceived as facilitators of very specific and targeted interventions. They have not fully integrated the different ways of knowing and doing of artists, creatives, and chefs into the actual design of transdisciplinary processes. Transdisciplinary collaborations leading toward more sustainable futures that have been co-designed from scratch by relying on different knowledge and practices, including (but not restricted to) local stakeholders, chefs, creatives, artists, and scientists are quite rare but urgently needed. As this is a novel field, we aim to open the call to gather diverse experiences around the world. It will be an important opportunity to exchange perspectives, look for evaluation framework alternatives, methodological innovations, and foster new lines of research in this topic. Contributions should reflect genuine transdisciplinary collaborations with local stakeholders, scientists, and artists, creatives, or chefs from the early design of the research with a focus on transformations toward sustainability. The role of them cannot be complementary but must be a structural element of the project. Lead authors are encouraged to consider representing the diverse composition of their transdisciplinary teams in the manuscript authorship. Please submit your abstracts before August 1st to mmesa@ecosur.mx and rcalderon@cua.uam.mx.

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