This editorial by Mesa-Jurado et al. unfolds as a compelling call to radically reimagine transdisciplinary sustainability science through the aesthetic and political force of collaboration between artists, scientists, and local knowledge holders; the authors reject conventional epistemologies that privilege abstract, rational, and extractive modes of inquiry, arguing instead for a transformative paradigm that honours emotional, embodied, and place-based knowledge as equal to technical expertise, thereby dismantling entrenched hierarchies in academic research and reactivating care, creativity, and collective agency in planetary crises; through an impressive array of grounded case studies—from community cookbooks and ocean photostories to itinerant festivals and pollinator paths—the editorial outlines how art-science partnerships can mobilize “deep leverage points” to provoke structural change in food systems, governance, and climate imaginaries; central to these collaborations are methods such as material deliberation, participatory visioning, storytelling, and co-design, all of which not only enable transformative dialogue, but generate new boundary objects that mediate across ontologies and power asymmetries; while recognising persistent barriers—including tokenism, institutional inertia, and epistemic colonialism—the authors affirm that carefully cultivated relationships, anchored in shared values, local contexts, and ethical reflexivity, can yield resilient ecosystems of meaning-making, where art becomes not a tool for science but a generative force for worlding otherwise; the paper ultimately positions art-science transdisciplinarity not as an aesthetic supplement to research, but as a critical infrastructure for fostering slow, situated, joyful, and justice-oriented responses to the polycrises of our time, thereby transforming not only knowledge production but the very terms of social imagination. (Mesa-Jurado, M. A. et al. (2024) Meaningful transdisciplinary collaborations for sustainability: local, artistic, and scientific knowledge, Ecology and Society, 30(4):7. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-16491-300407
