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This special issue moves beyond an understanding of diagrams as mere inscriptions of objects and processes, proposing instead to re-evaluate diagrammatic reasoning as the work that is carried out with, on, and beyond diagrams. The introduction presents this issue’s focus on ‘working with diagrams’ in a way that goes beyond semiotic, cognitive, epistemic, or symbolic readings of diagrams. It discusses recent research on diagrams and diagrammatic reasoning across disciplines and approaches diagrams as suspended between imagination and perception—as objects with which work is done and as objects that do work. Contributions to this issue probe diagrams for the work they do in the development of disciplinary theories, investigate their reworking of questions of time and scale, and ask how some diagrams work across fields and disciplines. Other authors shift the perspective to their own work with diagrams, reflecting on the practice and performative nature of diagrammatic reasoning in their respective fields and disciplines.

The idea of the diagram as a ‘working object’ is used to discuss the biologist C. H. Waddington’s epigenetic landscape (EL) diagrams. This article investigates the diagrams’ history and discusses their usages in relation to Stengers’s idea of the ‘nomadic concept’. What is it about these diagrams that have made them a tool for transdisciplinary research? The article argues that it is useful to distinguish between the diagram and the illustration, and that it is in part because the EL diagrams retain an illustrative graphic character that they have been apt for imaginative adaptation and reuse. The diagram in this case becomes an ‘ontological go-between’ that is thereby able to function in different contexts, such as sociology and anthropology.