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Paper short abstract

Using participatory cartography, this paper analyses sustainability research communication not as an auxiliary practice, but as part of the infrastructural work through which sustainability research is assembled, negotiated, and oriented as a field-in-the-making.

Paper long abstract

Sustainability research is characterised by its problem-oriented, transdisciplinary ambitions and its entanglement with societal values, futures, and publics. Distinctions between the production and communication of scientific knowledge therefore become blurred. This paper takes that dissolution as its point of departure, asking how sustainability communication participates in the assembly of sustainability research as a field-in-the-making.

The paper analyses a process in which a diversity of sustainability researchers, communicators, educators and other actors collaboratively developed a visual map of sustainability research communication in Denmark. The map emerged through three iterations in which workshop discussions informed successive versions, which were reintroduced as objects of reflection and negotiation. This analysis approaches the evolving map as an infrastructural artefact, focusing on three cartographic moves: (1) the reconfiguration of theory and practice from bounded domains to navigable relations, (2) the emergence of ethics as a compass for orientation, and (3) increasing reflexivity toward the map itself. In this way, the paper traces shifting imaginaries of coordination, authority, and legitimacy which point toward changing ways of inhabiting an uncertain epistemic space - rather than disciplinary consolidation.

The paper argues that empirically grounded accounts of sustainability research field formation require attention to communicative infrastructures and actors. In this sense, mapping functions as infrastructural fieldwork: a situated practice that both reveals and participates in processes of assembly and negotiation. It thus makes visible how sustainability research itself is held together through communicative infrastructures.

Keywords: sustainability research; science communication; field formation; infrastructuring