From reflexive co-production to diffractive co-becoming: insights from new materialism for sustainability sciences

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 order to meet widespread calls for transformation away from unsustainability, research processes themselves need to transform to avoid perpetuating the very challenges they are meant to meet. 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. Science and feminist studies, and specifically new materialism, have made interesting propositions for advancements, such as diffractive approaches, that could lend important insights for researchers who are part of transformative change processes. Both sustainability science and new materialism are centrally concerned with making a difference in the world, but thus far, there has been relatively limited exchange between the two fields. The aim of this paper is to show how insights from new materialism can be embodied in the how of sustainability science, to help foster the potentiality for transformative science. The paper is situated amongst current frontiers of sustainability science: a recent turn towards more relational thinking, knowledge co-production and reflexivity, and posits that diffractive approaches could develop these frontiers further, explicitly outlining how to engage in research in which researchers are embedded in the world they seek to understand. Through a personal narrative based on a long-term collaborative ethnography between a researcher and farmer, 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. The paper concludes with considerations of a new ethics of entanglement for doing sustainability research.