Knowing Otherwise: Art-Science Practices and the Politics of Knowledge Production

In the context of climate change, dominant modes of knowledge production remain largely shaped by Western, positivist and disciplinary scientific paradigms that privilege abstraction, quantification and expert authority. These frameworks systematically marginalize situated, embodied, affective and relational forms of knowing, as well as the voices of those most impacted by climate injustice. Transdisciplinary knowledge production is therefore necessary for epistemic justice because it disrupts these hierarchies and opens knowledge-making processes to plural epistemologies.

This contribution reflects on Science Meets Art (SMA) as a practice-based platform where artistic and scientific methodologies are brought into transdisciplinary collaborations to rethink climate-related knowledge production. Challenging the instrumentalization of art as a communication or dissemination tool and instead, SMA recognize creative practices as epistemic practices positioning creative and arts-based methods as epistemic practices that actively shape research processes, questions and outcomes in environmental inquiry.

Drawing from projects such as “Engendering Climate Futures”, we explore how art-science collaboration enables forms of knowledge production that are situated, embodied, affective and relational, dimensions which are historically erased from academia and often marginalized in conventional climate research. Additionally, we investigate how transdisciplinarity is operationalized through arts-based methods.

“Engendering Climate Futures” is a year-long research and artistic project by Science Meets Art and SOHO Studios in Vienna, focusing on the intersectionality of gender and climate justice, including participatory workshops and featured in an ecofeminism-themed exhibition “What grows between us”. This project employed a participatory mapping exercise of gendered climate change experiences in Vienna, body-territory approaches rooted in decolonial feminist Central and South American methodologies, and collective practices of imagining just climate futures.

These methods create shared spaces of experimentation where artists, scientists, activists and a diverse public co-produce knowledge, allowing for emotional and embodied dimensions of climate change to inform research and policy-oriented debates.

We argue that arts-based methods contribute to epistemic justice by democratizing knowledge production, centering marginalized perspectives and recognizing erased sources of knowledge such as bodies, emotions and lived experiences as legitimate sites of gender and ecological knowledge. These aspects are usually neglected in conventional scientific methods like surveys or expert elicitation. Through the co-creation of visual, material and performative artifacts, SMA fosters inclusive, interactive and reflexive research environments that support trust, dialogue and mutual learning across disciplinary boundaries. Ultimately, this contribution positions art-science transdisciplinarity as central to reimagining climate knowledge and enabling more plural, just and transformative climate futures.