Artful Sustainability in Transdisciplinary Spaces of Possibilities

Abstract

Following up on my previous article on “Artful Sustainability” in the Transdisciplinary Journal of Engineering and Science, this article discusses artful approaches to the conduct of transdisciplinary research, to living a queer-convivialist art of life, and to the development of spaces of possibilities in society. The article is divided in four movements: First, seven plagues hindering transdisciplinary learning are discussed. Second, the qualities of artistic  and  arts-based  research are reviewed, with a focus on the development of aesthetics of qualitative complexity. Third, a question is posed: What are the implications of aesthetics of qualitative complexity at the personal level? Moving my focus onwards to the personal lifeworld experiences of human beings, I advocate for a turn to a queer-convivialist life-art, encouraging a complex experience of the world where harmony through contradictions is embraced and played with. Fourth, I articulate the ”real-world” relevance of artful approaches with the discussion of societal spaces of possibilities: shared  physical,  social and mental spaces where the search process of sustainability  is  activated  through  imagination, experimentation, challenging experiences, creative and participative learning, and prefigurative doing. Artful sustainability mobilizes art as a verb - a transformative force in society and a source of complex questioning that sharpens our ability to engage, through transdisciplinarity, with the world’s compounding challenges.