Art, Action, and Science

The SAGE Methodspace focus for December 2022 is on Creative, Arts-Based, and Visual Methods. This collection of open-access journal articles offers different perspectives for using the arts across disciplines, in all phases of the research process. While some discuss creative ways to collect data, others look at ways to share findings.

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See these special issues: “Action Research and the Arts” and “Action Research and Indigenous Ways of Knowing” from the open-access Canadian Journal of Action Research

Ellison, A.M., LeRoy, C.J., Landsbergen, K.J., Bosanquet, E., Borden, D.B., CaraDonna, P.J., Cheney, K., Crystal-Ornelas, R., DeFreece, A., Goralnik, L., Irons, E., Merkle, B.G., O'Connell, K.E.B., Penick, C.A., Rustad, L., Schulze, M., Waser, N.M. and Wysong, L.M. (2018), Art/Science Collaborations: New Explorations of Ecological Systems, Values, and their Feedbacks Bull Ecol Soc Am, 99: 180-191. https://doi.org/10.1002/bes2.1384

Collaborations between artists and scientists have a long history. In recent years, artists have joined with ecologists to showcase biodiversity, links between biodiversity and ecosystem function, and the effects of human activities on the broader environment. In many cases, artists also have provided “broader impacts” for ecological research activities, communicating scientific findings in creative and novel ways to audiences much broader than the readership of our technical journals.

Petersen, K. L., Leshyk, V. O., Marks, J. C., & Hungate, B. A. (2020). Science-telling through art. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 18(3), 115-115. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1002/fee.2186

The stakes for responsible, compelling science art have always been high (an illustrator better get the number of chambers in the heart right) but in recent years they have grown higher. Global environmental challenges require our research to move beyond journal pages and poster halls, while outside these venues (eg on Twitter) the noise-to-signal ratio has steepened. Every figure, whether a thoughtfully rendered close-up of mycorrhizal partners at root tips or a misleadingly binned histogram, now has the potential to reach hundreds of thousands of readers and decision makers. Art can boost science's signal.

Schroeter, I. M., Forrester, C. C., Brigham, L. M., Fried, E. R., Grabenstein, K. C., Karban, C. C., & McDermott, M. T. (2019). Diverging from the Dogma: A Call to Train Creative Thinkers in Science. The Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America, 100(1), e01463. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1002/bes2.1463

Science is an inherently creative process at each step, from synthesizing literature, identifying knowledge gaps, designing robust studies, to troubleshooting in the field (Osborne et al. 2003, Hadzigeorgiou et al. 2012). Creative thinking in the context of science has been defined in many ways, but we use Hadzigeorgiou et al.'s (2012) definition for the purposes of this piece – scientific creative thinking is an imaginative process that incorporates content-based knowledge to generate novel ideas.

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