INTRODUCTION

Pollinator decline is often referred to as a multidimensional problem underlined by multiple drivers, including pesticide use, climate change, land use practices, and habitat destruction (IPBES 2016, Sánchez-Bayo and Wyckhuys 2019), with far-reaching consequences for the ability of ecosystems to provide their services of pollination for food production, above all, and for biodiversity (Ollerton et al. 2011, Porto et al. 2020). As such, it is a typical sustainability issue marked by a high level of complexity and uncertainty. Among many relevant studies that have addressed this issue (Kevan and Viana 2003, Potts et al. 2010), the publication of the 2016 IPBES Assessment Report on Pollinators, Pollination and Food Production (IPBES 2016) constituted a major milestone in putting the decline of pollinators on the policy priority shortlist. To provide a coordinated and continent-wide response to this issue, in 2018, the European Commission launched the EU Pollinators Initiative (European Union 2023; https://environment.ec.europa.eu/topics/nature-and-biodiversity/pollinators_en). That communication set out a framework consisting of short- and medium-term actions aiming: (1) to improve the knowledge of the decline, (2) to address the drivers of the decline, and (3) to promote the engagement of society at large, including the formation of new collaborations. The third priority is of particular interest here because it calls for the establishment of collaborations across different groups of actors and domains, “including scientists, policymakers, citizens, farmers, and businesses” (European Union 2023:9).

The third priority of the EU Pollinators Initiative is in line with those linked to sustainability transitions and requires broad public engagement in scientific knowledge production. In this perspective, the pursuit of an “extended peer review” mode of knowledge with the involvement of non-academic types of knowledge and actors (Funtowicz and Ravetz 1993) is instrumental for different reasons: to unearth situated expertise and produce knowledge that is fit-for-purpose to the problem at hand (Funtowicz and Ravetz 1993, Mobjörk 2010), to foster social reflexivity as opposed to scientific autonomy (Gibbons et al. 1994, Nowotny et al. 2001, Hessels and van Lente 2008, Nogueira et al. 2021), and to promote social learning for collective action as well as actionable knowledge (Wiek et al. 2012, Schneider et al. 2019). Such a knowledge type builds on the idea that it is possible to cross and even trespass a series of disciplinary and epistemological boundaries to achieve transdisciplinary knowledge (Gibbons et al. 1994, Nowotny et al. 2001).

However, it is not always clear what it means to involve diverse types of knowledge and actors and what kind of processes and practices underpin such involvement. In particular, in complex sustainability issues, transdisciplinarity is often found to deliver below the expectations, especially when citizens are engaged in knowledge co-creation processes, as opposed to stakeholders and experts.

Here, citizens are not defined by reference to any formal legal status, but rather as all those individuals who inhabit a given territory and so are either directly or indirectly affected by what happens there. Second, citizens are those who join a participatory process, bringing in their own individual experience and knowledge grounded in daily life lived in a given area. This aspect is what distinguishes them from stakeholders, who are representatives of an organized interest group promoting a specific cause, and experts, who bring in formal knowledge (Michels and De Graaf 2010, Kaplan et al. 2021).

Here, I also recognize that the difference between citizens, stakeholders, and scientific experts lies in the legitimacy awarded to each of them in structuring knowledge, discourses, and narratives over a matter of interest, as well as in their ability to exercise organized influence in the public sphere. Stakeholders have this legitimacy and power, whereas citizens typically do not. Therefore, the engagement of citizens in transdisciplinary knowledge production involves a clear asymmetry of power in terms of their ability to share and to make. There are different epistemologies at stake when those types of conversations are built, but not all of them have the same power to materialize in structured, “disciplined” forms.

The problem of valuing “undisciplined knowledge” openly touches on the organization and success of transdisciplinary exercises and practices (Darbellay 2015). Among the main issues is the fact that many transdisciplinary processes are rather tokenistic and based on consultative rather than participatory techniques. Consequences are various: they end up subscribing to a prevailing epistemic framework (Elzinga 2008, Mobjörk 2010); the integration between different forms of knowledge (disciplinary, non-disciplinary, and informal) does not occur throughout the whole transdisciplinary research process (Mobjörk 2010, Wiek et al. 2012, Weichselgartner and Truffer 2015), but such integration mostly concerns the initial phase of problem framing (Mobjörk 2010, Wiek et al. 2012). Moreover, policy uptake can be very poor, even when the process allows for usable and accessible knowledge (Wiek et al. 2012, Polk 2015).

Specifically here, as the leading researcher and participatory designer working on the project, I address the project’s transdisciplinary process through which citizens and other actors have been engaged to work on the pollination decline issue, and I focus on how participatory actions can help avoid epistemic asymmetries (Tokarsky et al. 2024). Challenged since the beginning of writing this paper to set up a shared framework on the concept of transdisciplinarity, I chose to refer to the evocative definition synthesized by Lattanzi (1998) in his report of the UNESCO symposium Transdisciplinarity: Stimulating Synergies, Integrating Knowledge. That report introduces the “spatial dynamics of transdisciplinarity,” which was discussed during the conference and articulates into the “intellectual innerspace,” and “intellectual outerspace” to denote the areas occupied by the various disciplines in connection with transdisciplinarity. The innerspace refers to the knowledge provided by the single disciplines, whereas the outerspace is beyond the innerspace’s borders, where transdisciplinarity takes place. According to this definition, transdisciplinarity does not reject the disciplinary perspective; it actually builds on it, fostering the emergence of new possible insights at and beyond the borders between disciplines. The concept of intellectual inner- and outerspace is a reminder that knowledge boundaries outline a horizon for new forms of knowledge, rather than setting limits to its development. The symposium also pointed out that the challenge to face consists of how to give the outerspace structure without rigidity, and how to create a transdisciplinary environment that could be intellectually credible.

Here, I focus on Percorso Impollinatori (Tracing a Pollinator’s Path), a transdisciplinary citizen engagement project aiming to address the decline of wild pollinating insects via material deliberation methods and the involvement of citizens, farmers, scientific experts, and artistic professionals. By “material deliberation,” I refer to a participatory method based on the material and affective dimensions of collaboration that I will expand upon in the Methods. Specifically, I describe the three participatory actions that I co-designed and implemented in summer 2022 in Italy as instances of material deliberation methods. I then analyze how each participatory action allowed for the emergence of transdisciplinary learnings, how different epistemologies were brought together, and how they produced new knowledge on the issue of and solutions to pollinator decline.

In the Methods, I apply Lattanzi’s (1998) definition of transdisciplinarity. I aimed to retrace the innerspaces by mapping the different knowledge types informing the project, and to describe how the spatial dynamics of transdisciplinarity were enabled. Consequently, I argue that material deliberation has real potential to address the abovementioned asymmetries in those participatory processes that include both “disciplined” and “undisciplined” knowledge. I will characterize the transdisciplinary knowledge gained on the pollination decline issue as an intimate, embodied knowledge beyond any discursive and functional one. I then conclude with a discussion of how it is potentially possible to affect the way scientific knowledge would develop further with the possibility of a good feedback loop among science and moral values.

METHODS

Tracing a Pollinator’s Path required building a specific methodology to cope with the multiple challenges recognized in such a complex project:

• to gather formal and informal knowledge holders around the issue of pollinator decline,
• to enable transdisciplinary dynamics among the knowledge holders, and
• to support the integration of disciplined and undisciplined knowledge and to avoid asymmetries of power.

To build the methodology, I applied a participatory design approach because it seems to serve the purpose of gathering different knowledge holders in an attempt to co-create new knowledge and outcomes, and to be flexible enough to afford adjustments along the way. The participatory design approach is a research-based design practice usually led by an experienced designer (me) working with a community, who involves users and stakeholders right from the beginning of the process to (re)frame the question to address, to design new solutions through co-creation, to rehearse them in the context through prototyping (Simonsen and Robertson 2013), and eventually, to reiterate the whole phases. Participatory design is about “drawing things together” through situated activities, iterative transformation (Binder et al. 2011), and staging collaborative encounters between otherwise disparate communities (Brandt et al. 2013). Because the participatory design approach usually applies to multiphase design processes, the methodology for Tracing a Pollinator’s Path took shape as a “methods pipeline,” with each method addressing one or two specific challenges of the project. It is important to note that in a participatory design process, methods are never fixed, but are constantly adjusted by their users in an iterative and collaborative way to adapt their use to both the local context and emerging obstacles.

I composed a methods pipeline structured by three interlinked methods:

• Building collaborative assemblages for each specific participatory action,
• Designing the participatory actions as instances of material deliberation, and
• Enacting the participatory actions in the local context.

Method 1: building collaborative assemblages for each specific participatory action

I established heterogeneous groups of people, including citizens, farmers, artists, scientists, engineers, and software developers, at the start of the project. Beekeepers were included in the citizens category, although it was acknowledged that they have special knowledge about pollinating insects. I called these groups “collaborative assemblages.” The collaborative assemblages were established to gather knowledge, to meet the needs of the experimental activities, and to perform the activities as the participatory actions took shape and were deployed in the field. Some of these actors participated in the design of the participatory actions, some actively performed them, and some did both.

By setting up different collaborative assemblages for each participatory action that would be performed throughout the project, I tried to identify the disciplined and undisciplined innerspaces of knowledge around pollinator decline that would serve the project and to gather them together through the involvement of knowledge holders. The boundaries were indeed traced by the collaborative assemblages; however, such boundaries were not aiming to restrict participants and collaborators within their own discipline, expertise, or knowledge, but rather to prompt overcoming barriers through unexpected and creative dynamics toward a new kind of (transdisciplinary) knowledge in support of pollinating insects.

From a theoretical viewpoint, I acknowledge that by calling such encounters collaborative assemblages, the well-known philosophical concept of the “assemblage” is recalled, which has been largely theorized and criticized since the 1980s. I resonate with Deleuze and Parnet’s (1987:viii) thoughts on the assemblage, as they say that “in a multiplicity, what counts are not the terms or the elements, but what is ‘between’ them, the in-between, a set of relations that are inseparable from each other.” This in-betweenness seems to retrace Lattanzi’s (1998) idea of intellectual outerspace. Moreover, Deleuze and Guattari (1988) describe many examples of assorted assemblages, stressing that an assemblage always changes through the relationships that its members or elements weave. In Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) view, the assemblages are caught up in a dynamic of deterritorialization and reterritorialization: they establish territories as they emerge and hold together, but also constantly mutate, transform, and break up. In relation to the Tracing a Pollinator’s Path project, the potential dynamism triggered by the assemblages captures the very attempt to activate different knowledges and disciplines and co-create new ones, so to move from the “intellectual innerspace to the outerspace,” using Lattanzi’s (1998) words.

However, the concept of assemblage has been widely criticized by philosopher Ingold (2015), who provides some of the theoretical foundations for the work herein. Ingold (2015:7) argued that dynamism cannot be associated with the concept of assemblage by default because “what is missing from the additive logic [of the assemblage] is the tension and friction that make it possible for persons and things to cling. There is no movement. In the assemblage, it is as though the dancers had turned to stone.”

I think that the way of conceiving the assemblages as collaborative within the making of each participatory action is itself addressing Ingold’s (2015) concern about the assemblages’ immobility. I will come back to the collaborative assemblages at the end of this paper to discuss if and how they activated transdisciplinary dynamism at and beyond the disciplines’ borders.

Three participatory actions were designed and performed in the Tracing a Pollinator’s Path project. Thus, I built three different collaborative assemblages, which will be described in The Participatory Actions section.

Method 2: designing the participatory actions as instances of material deliberation

To avoid any asymmetry of power and lack of legitimacy in sharing and integrating different forms of knowledge such as those brought by citizens and scientific experts, making the project experiments “just participatory” was not enough. The risk mainly was in the diffused use of verbalization for participatory processes, which comes from the Enlightenment paradigm and the well-established idea that “reasoned discourse,” i.e., one based on informed and logical argumentation (Habermas 1984, Elster 2009), can always occur if properly facilitated. The limits of an exclusively rational-discursive setting lie both in the fact that it almost automatically gives scientists an epistemic advantage over non-scientists and shies the latter away from active engagement, as well as in the fact that there also exists an important nondiscursive dimension of knowledge in which meanings, intuitions, affects, and lived experiences cannot be conveyed by logic, reasons, and verbalized rational argumentation (Young 2001). To overcome these limits, I took inspiration from authors such as Sandercock (2001a, 2003), who has worked with participatory spaces in which diverse groups can “speak their feelings” through a process of “emotional involvement, of embodiment” that allows bringing in “experiential, intuitive and contextual knowledges.” Furthermore, the project experimentation builds on the work of Davies et al. (2012), who proposed material deliberation as a participatory method based on the material and affective dimensions of collaboration. To give an example of what material deliberation could look like, Davies et al. (2012) describe the Blue Line project, which was an activist art intervention that gathered people to paint a blue line along the pathway of sea level rise in several locations around the globe. The idea was to build an immersive experience to draw attention to possible scenarios of climate change and combine this experience with a variety of educational programs and other outreach activities. Another example is the Decision Theatre by the Arizona State University, a decision lab consisting of a visualization structure offering an immersive environment in which participants could look at complex data and sophisticated visualizations and test how alternative decisions would bring different scenarios alive (White et al. 2010). Thus, material deliberation builds on non-discursive activities such as visualizations, play, performance, and tinkering, through which a multiplicity of voices is not just presented, but brought into interaction, with the focus being on meanings, intuitions, relationships, and affects.

For this project, I designed three different participatory actions as instances of material deliberation. They focused on personal experiences of pollinators and pollination, the values citizens and farmers attribute to such experiences and to pollination services, the pollinators’ decline issue from locally focused ecological and cultural perspectives, and eventually, on the generation of collaborative ideas to invert the decline and let pollinating insects thrive. The participatory actions will be described in detail in The Participatory Actions section.

Method 3: enacting the participatory actions in the local context

Enacting the participatory actions in the local contexts was a crucial phase in the project because it allowed envisioning what “could be” by rehearsing new possible human-pollinator relationships and new forms of collaboration between citizens and farmers to support pollination. As Halse and Boffi (2016) describe, empirical design interventions such as the project’s participatory actions are not meant to test a prefigured solution to a defined problem, but to enable new forms of experience, dialogue, and awareness about the issue. By enacting them, another form of inquiry is performed, opening up to complexity, bifurcation, and multiplicity. This new form of inquiry completely matches with the project goals to reframe the pollinator issue problem from local, multilevel, and at times, conflictual perspectives, and to ideate and safely rehearse in the context alternative ways of collaboration among citizens and farmers.

The participatory actions were enacted in summer 2022 in two different locations in Italy: Cesena and the protected territory of Abruzzo region. These regions differ significantly in their agricultural practices and social and urban contexts. Cesena is a small city in Emilia-Romagna region whose extended territory consists of 15 municipalities (Cesenate territory) where small farmers and intensive farms coexist. The area is especially known for the production of fruits such as apricots, strawberries, peaches, kiwi, cherries, and pears. In Abruzzo, the selected area included Parco Nazionale del Gran Sasso e Monti della Laga and the Parco Nazionale della Majella (national parks). These are protected areas located in a mountain territory with many small, traditional villages where farming is practiced in line with the biodiversity preservation rules of the parks.

THE PARTICIPATORY ACTIONS

I next describe each of the three participatory actions in terms of title, aim, collaborative assemblage, preparatory and enactment phases, and outcomes.

Participatory action 1: retracing the experiences

Aim

The “Retracing the Experiences” participatory action aimed to uncover the situated knowledge and experiences that citizens and farmers have about pollinating insects, as well as to inquire into future forms of collaborations among them to tackle pollinator decline.

Collaborative assemblage

The collaborative assemblage comprised: one participatory designer, four scientists, one artistic curator, > 15 citizens (among whom two were beekeepers) and two farmers involved in the preparatory phase; four farmers and 10 citizens (among whom one was a beekeeper) involved in the enactment phase.

Preparatory phase: the use of pictures

Citizens and farmers were asked to take pictures illustrating their experiences and knowledge connected to pollinators so as to gather a collection of pollinator-related snapshots. In total, 64 pictures were collected in Cesena and 111 in Abruzzo. Pictures taken by citizens showed mostly insects on flowers, whereas those taken by farmers also showed the environment and crops, linking the contribution of pollinators to their work.

A group of ecology experts and an art curator were then separately invited to curate two exhibitions of the same set of pictures in Cesena and Abruzzo (Fig. 1).

The idea of a double-blind curation was inspired by Metzger’s (2011) reflections on the disruptive role of arts in planning processes, according to which art can go far beyond supporting communication between different groups and favor “deep mental unhooking and suspensions of habits.” Thus, citizens and farmers were exposed to two different curatorial perspectives about pollinators (a scientific and an artistic one) through two separate exhibition paths positioned one in front of or next to the other.

Enactment phase: imagining acts of care

Citizens and farmers were then invited to select one picture from each exhibition and join a workshop where they were asked to (re)consider the situation portrayed therein and try to envision possible “acts of care” (Tronto 2020) to tackle pollinator decline. Material deliberation was enacted in the form of the so-called “entanglement tool,” which consisted of wooden tiles designed to make the collaboration tangible (Figs. 2 and 3). Participants worked in groups, preferably in pairs, with at least one citizen and one farmer on each side of the collaboration. The pictures chosen from the exhibition, in turn, allowed them to think through different acts of care, namely maintaining, improving, or repairing the situation pictured in the photo, and envisage collaborative actions that expressly respected the perspective and needs of their collaborative partner.

Outcomes

The use of elastic bands and labels in the entanglement tool allowed participants to visualize their established collaboration and metaphorically bind people, insects, and other natural beings together. Thus, participants came up with two interesting acts of care:

• Repairing the intensive strawberry cultivation territories in Cesena: This act of care was suggested by Farmer G, who thought that local farmers had harmed the environment to cultivate such a fragile, sugary, and fragrant fruit in the past, when the attention on biodiversity did not really exist in agriculture. Farmer G was paired with Citizen E, a primary school teacher. As a citizen, E suggested that she could collaborate in this act of repairing by bringing her students to visit the farms to request that farmers adopt more sustainable ways of cultivating strawberries. Opening the farms and getting citizens to see and visit them regularly could be a way to steer farmers toward more respectful and healthy agriculture.
• Improving fields that have dead vegetation: Farmer F suggested replacing a dead cherry tree, pictured in the photo she picked, with new plants. Citizen C, a citizen as well as a beekeeper, suggested that she could collaborate with Farmer F by helping to remove the wood and clean the field. The researcher asked them if, in that act of care, they also accounted for pollinators. With surprise, they realized that they did not and decided to iterate their act on the spot, to include such insects in the bigger picture. Citizen C, as an experienced beekeeper, took the lead and suggested which types of trees could be worth planting for the health of pollinators.

I found that the use of the entanglement tool helped to set a collaborative mindset between citizens and farmers, namely by envisioning the possibility of a common space for entangling their own respective visions and stories. Indeed, the dynamics of visualizing and binding the collaboration through the elastic bands helped participants in each group describe their own individual perspectives to their peer in a focused and articulate way, including respectfully disagreeing with them. Citizen C (a beekeeper citizen) and Farmer F, for instance, had discussed at length their opposite views about the photo of a field covered with flowers: Farmer F held that it represented a loss for the farmer, who would need to cultivate it, whereas Citizen C argued in favor of keeping more fields in that state for her bees. Thus, participants, even if disagreeing, were always listening to the other’s reasons. Thus, they were able to spot their own limits in enabling collaboration, which they expressed through their difficulty in accounting for pollinator well-being and suggestions to have a third and external voice, e.g., a pollination expert, to advise and provide feedback on the envisioned acts of care.

Participatory action 2: pollinators picnic

Aim

The “Pollinators Picnic” participatory action aimed to rehearse new human-pollinator relationships by helping people build knowledge of and confidence toward wild pollinators through situated experiences. The idea for this participatory action was based on the phenomenological concept of intercorporeality and what has been termed a meaningful experience in the tradition of hermeneutical thought. Intercorporeality describes a specific way of being with others, including animal others, that is pre-reflective and grounded in deeply ingrained significances of animals, which gives rise to certain ways of experiencing them and behaviors that remain unquestioned most of the time. However, there are moments in which the (animal) other can be encountered in a way that disturbs the usual way of engaging with them (Huth 2016). As examples, Aldo Leopold’s encounter with a dying wolf can be mentioned or Val Plumwood’s near death confrontation with a crocodile, which constituted profound moments of moral and intellectual transformation (Tokarski 2019). While the gaze has been important in these writings, other forms of encountering non-humans should also allow for this sort of opening-up of the space of signification, especially when we take seriously the claim that an encounter with another (animal) is not just a meeting of minds, but also of bodies. The sharing of a meal, normally reserved for humans (and in fact, specifically humans we are close to) could function as just such an unsettling of the established significations. In this sense, the picnic challenges the typical and well-established significance of insects, whether of service providers, nuisances, or objects of aesthetic admiration (respectively, bees, wasps, and butterflies). Returning to the purpose of this activity, the idea is not to engineer certain change, whether of attitude, behavior, or even moral consideration, but to give space for an experience to arise, which can then enrich the space of considerations, of moral intuitions and affects, that can be included in the debate.

Collaborative assemblage

The collaborative assemblage comprised: one participatory designer, one entomologist, six farmers (of whom two “collaborating” farmers hosted the picnics on their farms), and > 30 citizens (of whom eight were children).

Preparatory phase: setting up the picnic

Farmers were asked to host picnics on their farms during the season when pollinators are active and flowers are blooming. They identified the best locations and, together with or following the suggestions from the entomologist, made them more welcoming to pollinators. Citizens were asked to prepare their own food, which would at the same time be attractive to insects. An entomologist worked in the designing of a food guide with the designer, for use by citizens who would cook a more-than-human meal for the picnic, which was served on pan traps (brightly colored plastic bowls that are usually meant to be used as tools by researchers to monitor pollinators).

Enactment phase: imagining coexistence

People joined the picnic in groups of friends and family, bringing the food they prepared (Fig. 4). The entomologist attended the picnic to explain the behaviors of the insects visiting the food, to help identify them, and to offer advice on how to co-inhabit the picnic zone. During the picnic, plenty of informal conversations took place among the participants. Participants were instructed that whenever an insect alighted on the food, those sitting at the table would raise a small flag attracting the attention of other participants and the entomologist.

Outcomes

Participants embraced the spirit of the more-than-human picnic, as evidenced by the care they put into assembling their menu following the guidelines provided. The picnic was also attended by citizens who reported that they were generally scared to be stung by wasps or similar insects, to develop allergic reactions, or to come across a hornets’ nest without recognizing it and knowing how to act. However, no insects were harmed during the picnic.

The very act of sharing food with insects allowed citizens to observe the different behaviors of pollinators, experience their proximity, let go of typical reluctance and fear toward them, visualize commonalities between human and non-humans, and in this way, explore coexistence. One parent noticed with surprise that her children were comfortable sharing their space with pollinators during the picnic, whereas in ordinary life, she said, “[...] when they see an insect, it’s like they see a lion.”

Participatory action 3: the robot who wants to be a pollinator

Aim

“The Robot Who Wants To Be a Pollinator” participatory action aimed at inquiring into citizens’ and farmers’ conceptions of biodiversity, with a focus on pollinating insects (Busse et al. 2021). It also aimed to inspire new collaborations between citizens and farmers, which could lead to actions to tackle pollinator decline that were focusing on local food production.

Collaborative assemblage

The collaborative assemblage comprised: one participatory designer; one ecology scientist and one computer scientist from the University of Aarhus; one research and development department of a telecommunications company; 15 farmers (of whom 6 “collaborating” farmers hosted the robot on their farms, and 10 participated in the open days and the theatre representation); one playwright/actor; > 30 citizens (of whom 10–15 adults participated in the open days and the theatre representation, and approximately 10 children participated in the open days and the theatre representation).

Preparatory phase: building the robot, his narrative, and the theatre script

A speculative scenario was created, describing the mission of a prototype robot, which through his two different perspective cameras, computer vision, and machine-learning capabilities, had to monitor biodiversity on farms. A team of engineers helped build the robot using their 5G remotely driven rover. A team of ecology researchers contributed with their artificial intelligence software for autonomous pollinator monitoring.

According to the scenario, the robot fell in love with flowers during his mission and decided to become a pollinator to be as close to flowers as bees and butterflies are. When he realized that he could not turn into a pollinating insect, he decided instead to protect them to ensure that flowers would keep thriving in nature.

A theatre performance was developed by a professional playwright and performer based on scientific knowledge about pollinators and the robot experience in the field.

Enactment phase: collaborating with the robot and reflecting on his departure

Volunteer farmers were involved in hosting the robot for a period of 1 wk to 1 mo, positioning him in spots they considered worth monitoring for the presence of biodiversity (Figs. 5 and 6). Local citizens could visit the robot during open days at the farm and get involved in his mission by suggesting new locations on the farm (Fig. 7).

Before leaving the hosting farm, the robot invited people to the final event, a theatre performance, scripted based on the speculative scenario, scientific knowledge, and the actual on-farm experiences. It was performed by a professional actor.

A stage was created in an open field outlined by concentric circles. The stage was used for both the performance and the final workshop. During the performance, the robot shared his experiences at the farm, his love for flowers, and his future plans (Fig. 8). After the performance, the participants were asked to reflect on their own personal relationship with pollinators and to enact it physically on the stage by positioning themselves closer to or further from its center according to how close they felt toward pollinators (Fig. 9). The workshop ended by asking people to get in pairs and discuss their relationships with pollinators and possible ways to reverse their decline.

Outcomes

The enactment phase allowed me: (1) to collect individual perspectives on biodiversity from the hosting farmers and the people visiting the robot during the open days, (2) map existing human relationships with pollinators during the theatre performance, and (3) foster ideas for actions to reverse pollinator decline. Regarding (1), farmers did reflect on how and where to host the robot and were changing his position every day. One farmer did not mow the field before hosting the robot to let it grow wilder, even arguing with her father, who would have liked to mow it to better host the robot. Another farmer postponed the robot’s stay to wait for little flowers to bloom on the harvest field. During rainy days, a farmer was struggling with where to position the robot; he could not find a solution, and let the robot observe nature and the rain from under a roof. During the open days, visitors generally liked the idea of collaborating with the robot. The participants included children, citizens, and other farmers. Children were comfortable with the concept of biodiversity: they recognized biodiversity as places where “life happens,” and they could spot different living creatures. Farmers seemed to be very opinionated but not sure about what biodiversity meant for them. They defined it either as the absence of pesticides, places where vegetables grow better, or places where antagonist insects dwell in their cultivations. Adult citizens often did not know where to start to look for biodiversity on the farm; they were disoriented and needed to be given prompts.

Regarding (2), a human map was created on the theatre stage by the audience participants, picturing how close they felt toward pollinators. An aerial picture was taken by a drone. People consciously populated the circles, respecting the instructions provided. A couple of people decided to place themselves outside the circles because they realized they did not have any relationship with such insects, and a few were stuck at the borders, discussing on which side they should stand.

Regarding (3), the audience that discussed possible actions to reverse pollinator decline at the end of the workshop complained about the lack of proper knowledge on the pollinator issue. They admitted their ignorance on recognizing pollinating insects and their role in agriculture, thus preventing them from envisioning any collaboration between citizens and farmers to reverse pollinator decline. In contrast, one participant, a parent of two children, reported to have had a nice workshop session with a local farmer. The two agreed that farms should support more informal children’s visits, and that parents should bring their kids to attend to some phases of the work at the farm. This would favor children’s appreciation of the role of insects in agriculture and reduce fear toward them.

This participatory action proved to be a good way to start probing people’s personal ideas and values on biodiversity, which are related to the local context, as well as the links they draw between pollinators and biodiversity. Moreover, this action enabled a smooth transition from the speculative narrative to the reality of existing relationships between humans and insects, free from inflicting any judgement or creating any conflict among people. This action showed that people lack ordinary knowledge on pollinators and on their role in agriculture and that, before being asked to come up with actions to reverse pollinators decline, they need to be provided opportunities to grow their understanding of pollination and the roles of insects.

THE EMERGENCE OF TRANSDISCIPLINARITY THROUGH CORRESPONDENCE

I now reflect on how transdisciplinarity emerged in the Tracing a Pollinator’s Path project. A transdisciplinary body of knowledge on pollinator decline did not emerge from this work, and nor was one expected to emerge. Transdisciplinarity was conceived within the project as a process, i.e., of knowing beyond the borders of disciplines (Lattanzi 1998), and as a method of research that engages with scientific and social actors, as well as citizens, in the research process (Darbellay 2015). Therefore, the main learning is to acknowledge how transdisciplinarity emerged in specific outcomes of the participatory actions and, more specifically, to notice the “spatial dynamics of transdisciplinarity” (Lattanzi 1998) within each collaborative assemblage. Such dynamics, activated among the members of each assemblage, moved knowledge holders beyond the respective borders of their discipline or expertise to populate an intellectual yet uncharted outerspace.

I have recognized transdisciplinary outcomes both in the preparatory and enactment phases of the participatory actions, thus confirming that the results of a transdisciplinary project can include methodological advances, especially when we tackle a complex sustainability problem such as pollinator decline.

The following transdisciplinary outcomes emerged from the participatory actions.

• The acts of care in participatory action 1 “Retracing the Experiences,”
• The packed lunch prepared for the picnic and the conscious misuse of pan traps in participatory action 2 “Pollinators Picnic,” and
• The theatre performance script and the human map in participatory action 3 “The Robot Who Wants To Be a Pollinator.”

The acts of care in participatory action 1 that farmers and citizens co-created after visiting the exhibition are transdisciplinary outcomes of the enactment phase because, although in an indirect way, participants’ own perspectives were informed and broadened through both the scientific and the artistic curation of the exhibition.

The packed lunch that picnic participants prepared for participatory action 2 is a transdisciplinary outcome of the enactment phase. It is a materialization of the integration made by participants of their own informal and practical knowledge of pollinators, of what they learned from the entomologist’s menu guide, and of their aspiration to co-exist with pollinators during the picnic. The seemingly trivial act of changing the purpose of pan traps, which was decided during the design of participatory action 2, is a transdisciplinary outcome of the preparatory phase. It acquires significance when we contrast the scientific, original purpose of pan traps with the new one. These brightly colored plastic bowls are normally filled with water to catch insects for the purposes of monitoring species abundance and diversity. The color of pan traps is meant to emulate the color of flowers that normally attract certain insects. Ironically, the insects are killed in the process by drowning. Knowledge about the proper use and effects of pan traps, including understanding the rationale of their design as well as knowledge about the dietary preferences and behavior of insects are clearly connected to entomological practice. When the designer suggested using pan traps as serving dishes for the insects, the entomologist was skeptical and disorientated at first, but in the act of moving beyond his discipline innerspace, he agreed to misuse his scientific tool during the participatory action.

The writing of the theatre performance script in participatory action 3 easily stands as a transdisciplinary outcome of the preparatory phase, as it combined scientific, ethnographic, and artistic knowledge. The human map at the end of the theatre performance is a transdisciplinary outcome of the enactment phase because it visualizes human-pollinator relationships in an artistic and embodied way, after people attended to the scientific and ethnographic knowledge performed on the stage by the actor.

I recognize two specific characteristics in the emergent transdisciplinary outcomes. First, each of these outcomes can be spatially described as a movement between disciplines or innerspaces, initiated by knowledge holders who moved beyond the borders of their own discipline and settled in an outerspace. Second, the transdisciplinary outcomes are heterogeneous: a strategy for the future (the acts of care); a new physical product (the packed lunch) and a new use for a known product (misuse of the pan trap); and an artistic production (the theatre script) and a performance (the human map).

We could think of the movement described by the transdisciplinary outcomes as like a vector in physics. The term vector derives from Latin and means “carrier.” In this case, the vector is the carrier that is needed to carry a given point A (identified as where the knowledge holder stands in their own discipline/expertise) to point Z (the transdisciplinary outcome where the knowledge holders will settle). The question is: What prompts the movement from point A to point Z?

I reason using vectors because I believe it will ease the visualization of abstract movements. I suggest that the vector moving from the disciplinary point A toward the transdisciplinary outcome point Z can be thought of as the cross-product of (at least) two other vectors such as two different knowledge holders who, instead of staying within the borders of their own disciplines, decide to collaborate and integrate each other’s knowledge (and not simply add them). Therefore, I consider both knowledge holders as vectors, each one contained in their own innerspaces, who move beyond them toward the outerspace of transdisciplinarity through a displacement that happens as their knowledge or expertise is integrated into new outcomes. In physics notation, the cross-product of knowledge holders’ vectors can be expressed as: Knowledge holder A × Knowledge holder B = Displacement to transdisciplinary outcome Z.

A few times, as the designer co-designing the participatory actions with other actors in the collective assemblages, I acted as one of the two knowledge holders in the cross-product. At other times, I just facilitated the movements of thinking among knowledge holders within the assemblages.

In theory, this description could work, but as the project was deployed in the real world, how did these abstract movements take place among people? Drawing from Ingold’s (Gatt and Ingold 2013, Ingold 2017) concept of correspondence, I recognize transdisciplinary movements as “correspondence” dynamics among the members of the collaborative assemblages. According to Ingold, correspondence is a kind of relation in which the beings-in-relation are in a sort of dynamic conversation as they answer to each other in a continuous movement of thinking. Correspondence is the opposite of interactions such as confrontations or persuasions by means of logical discourse. Correspondence can be compared to the action of walking abreast (Lee and Ingold 2006), where companions move together and share virtually the same visual field (as opposed to facing each other and making eye contact, where people are stopped in their tracks, locked in their contexts, and blocking the other’s path). Eye contact is motionless, even if it induces a perfect union between the involved persons in a specific moment (Simmel 1969). In contrast, correspondence allows all parties to move and “[...] wrap around each other like melodies in counterpoint” (Gatt and Ingold 2013:139-158). Counterpoint is a musical composition technique in which two or more melodic lines (or voices) complement one another but act independently. Musicians of a chamber group playing a counterpointed piece of music move along together; they play as they listen and vice versa (Schütz 1951). Looking at the score of a counterpointed music is enough to recognize that all parties play together and answer to each other, as in the exchanging of musical themes in a Bach fugue (Boffi 2020).

In Tracing a Pollinator’s Path, the collaborative assemblages of each participatory action can be conceived as a musical chamber group whose members engage in a correspondence relation among concepts, ideas, and terminologies belonging to different knowledge innerspaces. Correspondence among the members of the same assemblage was possible due to the orchestration and facilitation of the leading designer, and it allowed people to share the same visual horizon from their own innerspaces, avoiding disciplinary opposition, and triggering movement beyond the respective disciplinary or expertise borders, as the vector pointing to the interdisciplinary outcomes in the outerspace. From a theoretical viewpoint, the activation of correspondence dynamics within the members of each participatory action’s assemblage also allows the process to overcome what Ingold was very critical of in the assemblage concept, i.e., the immobility of its elements. With reason, one could argue that here, a juxtaposition of the assemblage concept and Ingold’s correspondence concept has been made, regardless of the criticism brought forward by Ingold on the immobility of an assemblage’s elements. By infusing correspondence dynamics, I argue that assemblages can also embrace collaboration and a continuous movement of thinking among its members toward transdisciplinarity, and I have called these “collaborative assemblages.”

I would also like to reflect on the fact that this paper is authored by a single person, although the project involved many people with different roles from the start. The single authorship is a result of approximately two years of writing and reviewing, which began with a crowded group of coauthors. I believe that the reasons why people withdrew during the process are linked to the following. First, reflecting on transdisciplinarity is a subjective effort. Second, while one can be interested in being involved in a transdisciplinary project, that does not mean one is equally interested in reflecting and writing about it. In the first case, it seems to me that each author was departing from their disciplinary lens and personal experience, progressively tracing their own journey toward transdisciplinarity and making sense of it from their own perspective. Especially in this project, where transdisciplinarity emerged during the process and not only in the results, it has been a challenge to define what transdisciplinarity meant from a collective point of view, and we failed as a group of coauthors.

In the second case, the reflection on transdisciplinarity may not represent a major interest to the more technical people, resulting in withdrawal. I think that although Tracing a Pollinator’s Path has been a transdisciplinary work that involved a heterogenous group of collaborating people, reflection on the project and the process of writing the paper did not work as a choral effort, but instead more resembled an individual journey. I believe that this paper could have had many different versions if authored by different persons. The description of transdisciplinarity may not be a single story, but it can depend on where the writer looks from (their own discipline and experience). Based on my experience, I think that working on the project in a transdisciplinary way has been easier than writing about it, which was indeed difficult.

CONCLUSION

The Tracing a Pollinator’s Path project showed that a multiactor approach engaging formal and informal knowledge holders can lead to the emergence of transdisciplinary outcomes in tackling the pollinator issue, when engagement is activated through material deliberation methods. Referred to as participatory actions, the project’s material deliberation methods worked successfully as a material embodiment of a slow reflection process that brought together the epistemic pluralism of a variety of actors without subsuming them under a dominant epistemic framework. The participatory actions achieved that by combining scientific knowledge, emotions, artistic practices, non-discursive reasoning, and contextual knowledge in non-traditional and original ways. Transdisciplinary outcomes emerged not only in the enactment phase of the participatory actions, but also in the preparatory phase, when the designer leading the project co-created the actions with collaborating scientists, artists, local people, and farmers. Such outcomes include the outline of collaborative strategies for citizens and farmers to address local biodiversity decline (such as repairing the environment from intensive strawberry cultivation), the opportunity to experience new forms of co-existence between humans and pollinators in casual moments of ordinary life (such as in the picnic), and even the creation of a human map that put a tangible mark on people’s own relationship with pollinators (such as in the theatre performance). Another emerged transdisciplinary outcome is the misuse of a scientific tool during a participatory action (specifically, the pan trap during the picnic) and the writing of a theatre script based on scientific, ethnographic, and artistic knowledge. However, none of the project transdisciplinary outcomes can be described as a complete solution to pollinator decline, nor was I aiming to reach such a result with the project. I think of the transdisciplinary outcomes achieved as tiny yet powerful gear turns in the issue of pollinator decline, proving that the methodology that I built (1) to gather diverse knowledge holders, (2) to enable transdisciplinary dynamics, and (3) to support the integration of disciplines and expertise was promising in tackling such a sustainability issue. Future researchers are invited to reiterate the project design and prototyping process in other complex and conflictual sustainability contexts, building diverse collaborative assemblages and triggering unexpected transdisciplinary dynamics.

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