It is widely claimed that transdisciplinarity is essential for addressing complex, interconnected challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and social justice. Transdisciplinary approaches bring together multiple academic disciplines and non-academic forms of knowledge to reshape how we define problems, make decisions, and design more effective, inclusive, and responsive solutions.

Yet, while the benefits of transdisciplinarity are well recognized, doing transdisciplinary work can be deeply challenging. It demands new working practices that build trust, foster inclusive and caring environments, and provide positive and meaningful experiences for all participants. These are not innate skills, they must be learned and practiced, and research shows that creative methodologies have a key role to play. Creative methodologies can serve as a mode of inquiry, eliciting insights and ways of knowing that are grounded in lived experience, affect, culture, and the senses.

This session invites contributions that explore the space where arts and research meet, and where creative methodologies based on these modes of interaction become a tool for knowledge production beyond communication or outreach (Loroño and Olazabal 2025) . We are particularly interested in examples where art (including but not limited to visual arts, textile, performing, digital, painting, theatre, sound, sculpture, photography, music, etc.) has helped reshape the contours of environmental social science research, and where artistic methodologies have: (1) participated in and improved knowledge co-production processes, (2) enabled participatory, inclusive, and just research processes, (3) brought forward emotional, experiential, and embodied understandings often sidelined in conventional science.

We welcome theoretical reflections, case studies, collaborative projects, and experimental formats that argue for the arts as central, not peripheral, to the work of social environmental research for it to more effectively address current planetary challenges. We are looking for evidence and examples of how the combination of scientific and arts research has helped redefine scientific challenges, horizons and broken through traditional business and usual thinking. Join us in expanding this crucial conversation. Let’s explore how creative methodologies can help reimagine not only what knowledge is, but who holds it and how it’s made.