The underexplored potential of the arts in environmental social sciences

During the last two decades, there has been a growing focus on art-science collaborations in the field of environmental social sciences. Often still seen as an end-of-pipe tool for education and communicating scientific ideas, here, we call for broadening the arts and science interdisciplinary space, emphasising the role of art in knowledge co-production and participatory research in environmental social sciences. In particular, our perspective shifts focus towards the underexplored potential of the arts in contributing to the scientific inquiry itself, that is, the role the arts can play in the scientific study and analysis of the world or its views. To this end, art is presented here as a means for eliciting diverse forms of knowledge, including experiential and lay knowledge, and for advancing more participatory, decolonial, and culturally sensitive social-environmental research practices. Through carefully selected examples using written and visual arts, this paper explores how art is used and proposes a framework to understand the role it has taken during the scientific knowledge production process. This paper concludes that art has great potential to enhance scientific inquiry by opening the space for alternative forms of knowledge that are usually marginalised or are simply more difficult to access through traditional means. We suggest that this newly produced social capital has important implications for the construction of more just, relevant and legitimate social and environmental policies.