Researchers are part of the world we seek to understand

Sustainability dilemmas such as climate change and biocultural diversity loss have resulted in part from dominant Cartesian and Newtonian modes of thinking, which separate mind and matter, object and subject, social from ecological systems, foregrounding determinacy and linearity. In the Anthropocene era, which acknowledges the effects of human entanglement in Earth systems processes, rigorous sustainability sciences require methodological approaches that enable researchers to understand their own role in change processes.

Written by centre researcher Jamila Haider with farmer-interlocutor Präa Sepp, a new paper in Nature: Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, documents a collaborative research journey that led us to think and become differently with the world. Through a personal narrative drawing on new materialist philosophy, the paper shows how reflexive stances turn to diffractive processes, and where co-production of knowledge becomes a co-becoming with the world, leading to novel ways of knowing, doing and being.

Diffraction is the process by which the researcher and the researched affect each other in unexpected ways and are transformed through the process of research. The paper shows how a diffractive approach enables “letting go” of representative research conventions, and “being open” enables the space for researching with liveliness. The paper concludes with “saying yes” by outlining a new ethics of entanglement for doing sustainability research.

Haider and Sepp hope that it might inspire other scholars of sustainability to become differently in their own research, and thereby create spaces for transformative ways of thinking and doing.