Innovative methods to connect and communicate between disciplines

About

Interdisciplinary working that bridges different scientific fields is widely recognised as crucial for effectively understanding and responding to environmental issues. New policy directions such as nature recovery, therefore, offer exciting potential to develop and deploy evidence-based approaches to develop collaboration across academic disciplines and with non-academic partners. There has been a wealth of recent scholarship on strategies for working across worldviews and philosophies, connecting actors in multiple sectors of society, and navigating differences while respecting diversity. But more work is needed to integrate this evidence into practice.

Ten Facts from the Critical Interpretive Social Sciences for Environmental Research

The first part of this project focused on discussing and synthesising existing knowledge from environmental social science scholars about the concepts, methods and approaches that could support more and better interdisciplinary working. Throughout 2023, we held a series of three participatory workshops involving social and interdisciplinary scientists connected with – or working adjacent to – the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery. During these workshops, we engaged in deep conversation about our collective experiences of working in environmental research initiatives and reflected on what could be enhanced to enable more meaningful participation of social scientists in environmental research. In particular, we sought to reflect on what engagement with the knowledge and experience of social scientists could and should look like in practice. To distil these insights, we decided to develop a set of ten ‘facts’ from our training and experience in the environmental social sciences that reflected ‘collectively held truths about the world’ that would enable environmental researchers ‘to think and work productively together’.

This work led to the production of a journal article called ‘Ten facts from the critical and interpretive social sciences for environmental research’ in iScience (Montana et al., 2025)

Theatre games for environmental researchers

The second part of this project focused on experimenting with innovative methods to connect and communicate between disciplines. In practice, this involved a series of workshops during which we co-developed and piloted theatre-based activities that could be used by research groups or educators to help foster an interdisciplinary mindset amongst environmental researchers. This part of the project involved direct collaboration with practitioners from The Oxford People’s Theatre: a company for people with a passion for making theatre alongside professional artists based in Oxford, U.K. Together as academics and theatre practitioners, we combined the insights that we had developed from our discussions with social and interdisciplinary environmental scientists in the first part of the project with the creative methods of participatory theatre. Taking the Ten Facts as a starting point, we explored what theatre practice – such as movement, storytelling, and improvisation – could add to our understanding and approach to interdisciplinarity. Inspired by the work of Augusto Boal (especially Games for actors and non-actors, 1992), we adapted a range of theatre games and workshop techniques to create exercises that would encourage discussion, curiosity, and collaboration through physical, creative, and participatory activities.

This work led to the production of a journal article called ‘Catalysing an interdisciplinary mindset for environmental research through theatre games’ in Humanities and Social Sciences Communication (Welden et al., 2026).

This work also led to the development of an activity pack called ‘Theatre games for environmental researchers’: An activity pack for interdisciplinary mindsets, which is available for public download here 

The researchers on this project would like to thank and acknowledge support and funding from University of Oxford John Fell Fund, the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery, and the ANU Futures Scheme at the Australian National University.