Zanzibar workshop on Fundo Island with the Coral Communities team and Mwambao Coastal Community Network. Elders talking about objects representing their ecological and social resilience, in this case male and female shells. Photograph Timur Jack-Kadioglu.
Posted by dom in publications
Just published: Visualizing seascapes as a method for engaging stakeholders
Zanzibar workshop on Fundo Island with the Coral Communities team and Mwambao Coastal Community Network. The community and facilitators reviewing objects mapped into a resilience grid on the sand. Photograph Timur Jack-Kadioglu.
Coastal communities have complex bodies of knowledge around environmental change, resilience, and sustainability, which extractive forms of research are not well suited to understand. This paper outlines an arts-based action research pilot project to understand social-ecological resilience in the Western Indian Ocean. Our project used visual, artistic, and participatory approaches to foster co-learning and action research on: (1) the arts-based methods themselves and (2) resilience building in coastal communities and ecosystems. This paper focuses on the former elements. We present our inherently phenomenological approach as a research assemblage that can be used to bring together different communities and stakeholders, disciplines, epistemologies, and perspectives to understand our shared environment. Importantly, we propose that a multi-sensory, playful, and pragmatic concertina approach that draws on more than one arts-based method can create a crescendo effect that is more than the sum of its parts, creating an engaging environment for enduring and sustainable exploration of resilience among all members of the community.
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Coastal communities have complex bodies of knowledge, know-how, and experience of living in their changing environment. Some approaches to sustainability science portray these coastal communities as vulnerable people in need of external solutions, with extractive forms of research dominating (O‛Brien et al. 2007, Weatherill 2023, Gianelli et al. 2024). Framing communities through a “damage-centered” lens (Sarmiento et al. 2020) only serves to disenfranchise and disempower local communities while advancing dominant Western scientific framings of nature, sustainability, and environmental governance (Leach 2008). These tensions are particularly acute when considering diverse communities and their experiences of environmental change in the Global South.
Visual, creative, and artistic methods are increasingly integrated into interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary sustainability research as an alternative to positivist and western-centric analyses (Rose 2014, Scheffer et al. 2017, Paterson et al. 2020, Vervoot et al. 2024). These approaches share a common use of imagination and interpretation to build trust and empathy, explore different perspectives, open up dialog among different people and challenge established ways of thinking about issues (Edwards et al. 2016, Cohen-Miller 2018, Brown et al. 2019). Integrating arts-based methods within sustainability research is, thus, an important tool in breaking down barriers in what are often complex and contested social-ecological systems.