This open access book explores creative and collaborative forms of research praxis within the social sustainability sciences. The term co-creativity is used in reference to both individual methods and overarching research approaches. Supported by a series of in-depth examples, the edited collection critically reviews the potential of co-creative research praxis to nurture just and transformative processes of change. Included amongst the individual chapters are first-hand accounts of such as: militant research strategies and guerrilla narrative, decolonial participative approaches, appreciative inquiry and care-ethics, deep-mapping, photo-voice, community-arts, digital participatory mapping, creative workshops and living labs. The collection considers how, through socially inclusive forms of action and reflection, such co-creative methods can be used to stimulate alternative understandings of why and how things are, and how they could be. It provides illustrations of (and problematizes) the use of co-creative methods as overtly disruptive interventions in their own right, and as a means of enriching the transformative potential of transdisciplinary and more traditional forms of social science research inquiry. The positionality of the researcher, together with the emotional and embodied dimensions of engaged scholarship, are threads which run throughout the book. So too does the question of how to communicate sustainability science research in a meaningful way.
1. Introduction: Sustainability Science as Co-Creative Research Praxis.-
2. Painting Outside the Lines:Transgressing the Managerial University,
Avoiding Forced Creativity.-
3. Cooking commoning subjectivities: guerrilla
narrative in the Cooperation Birmingham solidarity kitchen.-
4. Participative
and decolonial approaches in environmental history.-
5. An Ethos and Practice
of Appreciation for Transformative Research: Appreciative Inquiry, Care
Ethics, and Creative Method.-
6. Imaginative Leadership: A conceptual frame
for the design and facilitation of creative methods and generative
engagement.-
7. Insights and inspiration from explorative research into the
impacts of a community arts project.-
8. How to nurture ground for arts-based
co-creative practice in an invited space: reflections on a community in North
Netherlands.-
9. Reflections on doing cross-cultural research through and
with visual methods.-
10. The Eye of the Beholder: Applying visual analysis
in an historical study oflynxes representations in the Bavarian Forest
region.-
11. Back to the drawing board: creative mapping methods for
inclusion and connection.-
12. Getting deep into things: Deep mapping in a
vacant landscape.-
13. Engaging 'future generations' in meaning making
through visual methods: an alternative approach to defining city-regions.-
14. Technology as a Tool for Environmental Engagement.The case of Digital
Participatory Mapping (DPM).-
15. Living Labs: a creative and collaborative
planning approach.-
16. Supporting institutional transformations:
experimenting with reflexive and embodied cross-boundary research.-
17. How
to make policy makers care about wicked problems such as biodiversity loss?
the case of a policy campaign.
Alex Franklin is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Agroecology, Water & Resilience (CAWR), Coventry University, UK. Her research explores collaborative forms of environmental action and care, with a particular focus on place-based practice, situated knowledge and more-than-human relations.
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