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Paper short abstract

Creative art-science scholarship broadens participation with positive implications for justice and knowledge making. Yet it also comes with unique ethical issues. This paper argues that "care" and "ethics work" can help us engage with such practices more thoughtfully.

Paper long abstract

Creative and art-based scholarship and related activities at the science-society interface represent ways to expand the range of opportunities for broader participation, whether that be participation from scholars, stakeholders, members of a community or others. Underlying such efforts is often an appeal to the value of broad, diverse and inclusive participation with dual purposes. There is an appeal to inclusion and participation based on justice and democracy (normative purpose) and on the other, there is an aspiration to improving our capacity to know the world around us (epistemic purpose). Examples include using reducing epistemic anxiety in research participants or redistributiing power when engaging marginalised communities (Furman et al.m 2019; Macknight, McEntee, & Medvecky, 2024).

While such methods do provide pathways for better work in our knowledge making, they are not immune to ethical challenges of their own which we ought to be attentive to. This paper reflects on the ethics of doing art-based scholarship and engagement activities at the science-society interface and considers some of the interactions between ethics, creative scholarship and knowledge making. It draws on the ethics of science communication and engagement where these concerns have already began to be noticed to highlight the importance of care (Held, 2005) and ethics work (Banks, 2016) as practices of relevance. I argue that if we are to fulfil the aspirations underpinning most (if not all) creative and art-based scholarship and related activities, we need to be attentive to the ethical challenges that arise from engaging with and undertaking them.