Across the great divide: Boundaries and boundary objects in art and science

Food systems transformations in South America: Insights from a transdisciplinary process rooted in Uruguay

The wicked nature of sustainability challenges facing food systems demands intentional and synergistic actions at multiple scales and sectors. The Southern Cone of Latin America, with its historical legacy of “feeding the world,” presents interesting opportunities for generating insights into potential trajectories and processes for food system transformation. To foster such changes would require the development of collective understanding and agency to effectively realize purposeful and well-informed action toward desirable and sustainable food futures. This in turn demands the transdisciplinary engagement of academia, the private sector, government/policy-makers, community groups, and other institutions, as well as the broader society as food consumers. While the need for contextualized knowledge, priorities and definitions of what sustainable food systems change means is recognized, there is limited literature reporting these differences and critically reflecting on the role of knowledge brokers in knowledge co-production processes. The political nature of these issues requires arenas for dialogue and learning that are cross-sectoral and transcend knowledge generation. This paper presents a case study developed by SARAS Institute, a bridging organization based in Uruguay. This international community of practice co-designed a 3-year multi-stakeholder transdisciplinary process entitled “Knowledges on the Table.” We describe how the process was designed, structured, and facilitated around three phases, two analytical levels and through principles of knowledge co-production. The case study and its insights offer a model that could be useful to inform similar processes led by transdisciplinary communities of practice or bridging institutions in the early stages of transformative work. In itself, it also represents a unique approach to generate a language of collaboration, dialogue, and imagination informed by design skills and methods. While this is part of a longer-term process toward capitalizing on still-unfolding insights and coalitions, we hope that this example helps inspire similar initiatives to imagine, support, and realize contextualized sustainable food system transformations.

Experiences and expertise of codependency: Repetition, claim-coupling, and enthusiasm

Arenas where experts interact with publics are useful platforms for communication and interaction between actors in the field of public health: researchers, practitioners, clinicians, patients, and laypersons. Such coalitions are central to the analysis of knowledge coproduction. This study investigates an initiative for assembling expert and other significant knowledge which seeks to create better interventions and solutions to addiction-related problems, in this case codependency. But what and whose knowledge is communicated, and how? The study explores how processes of repetition, claim-coupling, and enthusiasm produce a community based on three boundary beliefs: (1) victimized codependent children failed by an impaired society; (2) the power of daring and sharing; and (3) the (brain) disease model as the scientific representative and explanation for (co)dependence. These processes have legitimized future hopes in certain suffering actors, certain lived and professional expertise and also excluded social scientific critique, existing interventions, and alternative accounts.

Identifying transformational space for transdisciplinarity: using art to access the hidden third

A challenge for transdisciplinary sustainability science is learning how to bridge diverse worldviews among collaborators in respectful ways. A temptation in transdisciplinary work is to focus on improving scientific practices rather than engage research partners in spaces that mutually respect how we learn from each other and set the stage for change. We used the concept of Nicolescu's "Hidden Third" to identify and operationalize this transformative space, because it focused on bridging "objective" and "subjective" worldviews through art. Between 2014 and 2017, we explored the engagement of indigenous peoples from three inland delta regions in Canada and as a team of interdisciplinary scholars and students who worked together to better understand long-term social-ecological change in those regions. In working together, we identified five characteristics associated with respectful, transformative transdisciplinary space. These included (1) establishing an unfiltered safe place where (2) subjective and objective experiences and (3) different world views could come together through (4) interactive and (5) multiple sensory experiences. On the whole, we were more effective in achieving characteristics 2-5-bringing together the subjective and objective experiences, where different worldviews could come together-than in achieving characteristic 1-creating a truly unfiltered and safe space for expression. The novelty of this work is in how we sought to change our own engagement practices to advance sustainability rather than improving scientific techniques. Recommendations for sustainability scientists working in similar contexts are provided.

Understanding the public, the visitors, and the participants in science communication activities

Despite the promotion of public engagement in science, there has been little empirical research on the sociocultural and attitudinal characteristics of participants in science communication activities and the extent to which such individuals are representative of the general population. We statistically investigated the distinctiveness of visitors to a scientific research institution by contrasting samples from visitor surveys and nationally representative surveys. The visitors had more cultural capital (science and technology/art and literature) and believed more in the value of science than the general public, but there was no difference regarding assessment of the levels of national science or of the national economy. A deeper examination of the variations in the visitors' exhibit-viewing behaviors revealed that individuals with more scientific and technical cultural capital viewed more exhibits and stayed longer at the events. This trend in exhibit-viewing behaviors remained consistent among the different questionnaire items and smart-card records.

Boundary objects for institutional work across service ecosystems

Purpose

Institutional arrangements for collaborative purposes have gained increasing attention within research on service ecosystems. For collaborations to be effective, actors need to undertake institutional work that will result in new institutional arrangements. When institutional work takes place across service ecosystems, actors may be confronted with non-harmonious or conflicting institutional arrangements, which need to be reconciled by translating the incompatible views of diverse ecosystems. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to introduce the concept of boundary objects as a means of facilitating institutional work across ecosystems, and present their mechanism in undertaking institutional work.

Design/methodology/approach

Longitudinal qualitative interviews were conducted with three key actors (funding agency, service provider and clinicians) in providing home-based support services (HBSS). The data were analyzed by undertaking a thematic analysis of the transcripts, which helped to identify the actors’ views on the nature of HBSS and its impact as a boundary object within the implementation of the case-mix system, and thus to empirically illustrate the theoretical assumptions.

Findings

The data assisted in the creation of a conceptualization that maps out the process of boundary objects facilitating (disrupting and creating) institutional work. This study supports that boundary objects disrupt boundaries between actors’ ecosystems, which was a sufficient condition to dismantle institutional support for the practices of individual fields. Furthermore, the object has changed the type and extent of interaction between actors in an ecosystem to allow these actors to redefine their identity and role in the new institutional arrangement.

Originality/value

This work has developed a novel conceptualization for a boundary object-led translation process in facilitating institutional work. To the researchers’ knowledge, this is the first study to explore the processes and mechanisms of boundary objects in facilitating institutional work across ecosystems.

CLOWN SCOUTING AND CASTING AT THE CIRQUE DU SOLEIL: DESIGNING BOUNDARY PRACTICES FOR TALENT DEVELOPMENT AND KNOWLEDGE CREATION

A significant part of management in creative organisations is the discovery, development, and engagement of the creative talents. These activities require practices at the intersection of talent management, knowledge management and HR management. In this paper, we observed a bootcamp held at Cirque du Soleil in order to experiment with new casting and training practices for a scarce and specific occupational creative community: clowns. Our study shows that this bootcamp provides context at the borders of distinct practices: recruitment, training, and exploration. This intermediary zone allows the emergence of a boundary practice: the co-construction of what actors of the organisation and members of the communities do, make and learn to connect, create and understand new meaning of their shared reality in performance and exploration. This concept contributes to an improved understanding of the management of scarce talents in knowledge-and-creativity intensive fields, as hi-tech industries, software development, engineering, or creative industries.

What science are you singing? A study of the science image in the mainstream music of Taiwan

Previous research showed that pop music bands in the Western world have sometimes included science imagery in their lyrics. Their songs could potentially be helpful facilitators for science communication and public engagement purposes. However, so far no systematic research has been conducted for investigating science in popular music in Eastern cultures. This study explores whether science has been regarded as an element in the creation of popular mainstream music, and examines the content and quantity of distribution through an analysis of mainstream music lyrics, to reflect on the conditions of the absorption of science into popular culture. The results indicate that expressions related to astronomy and space science feature very prominently. Most of the lyrics are connected to emotional states and mood expressions and they are only very rarely related to actual issues of science. The implications for science communication and further research are discussed in the final section.

Sublime frequencies: The construction of sublime listening experiences in the sonification of scientific data

In the past two decades, the sonification of scientific data - an auditory equivalent of data visualization in which data are turned into sounds - has become increasingly widespread, particularly as an artistic practice and as a means of popularizing science. Sonification is thus part of the recent trend, discussed in public understanding of science literature, towards increased emphasis on 'interactivity' and 'crossovers' between science and art as a response to the perceived crisis in the relationship between the sciences and their publics. However, sonification can also be understood as the latest iteration in a long tradition of theorizing the relations between nature, science and human experience. This article analyses the recent public fascination with sonification and argues that sonification grips public imaginations through the promise of sublime experiences. I show how the 'auditory sublime' is constructed through varying combinations of technological, musical and rhetorical strategies. Rather than maintain a singular conception of the auditory sublime, practitioners draw on many scientific and artistic repertoires. However, sound is often situated as an immersive and emotional medium in contrast to the supposedly more detached sense of vision. The public sonification discourse leaves intact this dichotomy, reinforcing the idea that sound has no place in specialist science.