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Short abstract

Based on a study of a sustainability research centre, we examine how contested epistemic cultures create barriers to interdisciplinary collaboration and how introducing artists as epistemic partners can generate boundary practices and mediation processes that advance sustainability transformation.

Long abstract

Interdisciplinary sustainability research is widely understood as essential to support biodiversity transformations, yet little empirical work examines how epistemic cultures are negotiated over time within sustainability research centers. We present a two-year case study of the Centre for Sustainable Ocean Science, analysing both its formative first year and its subsequent experimentation with art-science integration.

In the first year, interviews and survey data revealed contested understandings of what counts as valid data, what knowledge is, what makes work useful, and what collaboration should look like. Interdisciplinary work mostly operated as a space of coordination, shaped by different research standards, different working speeds, and disciplinary reward systems. Collaboration often remained additive rather than genuinely co-productive, reflecting uneven development of communities of practice and persistent asymmetries in epistemic legitimacy.

In the second year, we were able to fund integration of artists into the centre as equal epistemic partners. We analyse new empirical material on how these new collaborations influence research design, collective sense-making and sustainability-oriented transformation. Particular attention is given to artistic practices as boundary objects and arts-based interventions that facilitate conceptual integration, emotional engagement, and relational depth in collective inquiry processes . We also examine emerging art-science mediation methods developed to address communication asymmetries and foster interactional expertise across disciplines.

By comparing first- and second-year dynamics, the paper examines whether and how creative boundary work can shift interdisciplinary practice toward more reciprocal and transformative modes of sustainability research.

Keywords: epistemic cultures, interdisciplinarity, art-science collaboration, boundary objects, mediation, sustainability transformation.