A vision on communication creating common grounds among disciplines, arts and society in scientific research

The complexity of the current ecological crisis dramatically exposes the limits of normal science to inform public debate and decision-making processes at the interface of ecological systems, society, and governance. To meet these challenges, the science community is bound to revisit its methods, aims and social role, forging new bonds not only with society, but also with ecological systems, to co-produce relevant and responsible knowledge practices. To this end, the Italian research project BRIDGES (Building Reflexivity and response-ability Involving Different narratives of knowledGE and Science) is experimenting transdisciplinary and reflexive modes of knowledge production applied to the socio-ecological topic of soil health. Engaging natural-social scientists, artists, farmers and citizens, the project is experimenting methods for co-producing hybrid research fostering systemic and relational thinking through transdisciplinary, participatory processes. All actors are conceived by design as knowledge co-producers, including communication in the central role of creating the common grounds among all epistemic actors, inside and outside the project. Moreover, since observation and sensorial exploration lay the grounds of science as well as of aesthetics and of experiential learning, arts-based experiences were also explored to allow researchers reimagining their relationship with soil - possibly leading to more systemic thinking and accounting for complexity. Early career researchers were involved in practices of aesthetic exploration and scientific measurement of the complex ecosystem of organisms populating the topsoil, and citizens were engaged in citizen science experiments on urban and rural soil health appraisal. While the project is ongoing, in this paper we present an overview of the project and we evaluate the results and pitfalls of BRIGDES' innovative approach to transdisciplinary knowledge co-production, with communication at its heart, assessing the processual dimension of hybrid research as possibly able to build the common grounds necessary to tackle complex and controversial socio-ecological challenges.