Artful Sustainability: The artistic turn in sustainability science

The cultural dimension of sustainability points to a renewed epistemological imagination for sustainability science, fueled by artistic and arts-based research approaches. Sustainability can then move beyond a modernist and technocratic discourse of optimization that perpetuates an illusion of cybernetic control, opening up instead an imaginative world-making journey towards the art of living well together. An artful sustainability research expands reflexivities, framed by a candid transdisciplinarity within which arts-based inquiries open up spaces of possibility. It queers perceptions, affects and thoughts, embracing the complexity and creativity of life, thus training a sensibility to qualitative complexity that is indispensable for an integrated approach to sustainable development.