Sustainability Centered Humanities

The Sustainability Centered Humanities research team conducts research on sustainability, social justice and communicative or narrative practices, focusing on the interfaces between them. Our point of departure is that to meet the big challenges of our time we need to understand humans as cultural beings. Our research explores culturally situated relationships and responses to social and ecological sustainability, and the tensions that arise between different interests. A general goal is to explore how an increased understanding of cultural, social, and ethical perspectives on a world characterized by complexity and crises can contribute to proposals for solutions. The theory- and method-developing research contributes in various ways to a problematization of widespread conceptualizations of sustainability as well as to new models of democracy, commitment, and sustainable ways of life.

The research team consists of researchers and scholars from various subjects within the humanities. Research projects tackle, for instance, people's relationship to crisis management, knowledge production, the more-than-human world, and constructions of the past and the future. The analyses engage with discursive practices such as experience/tradition, expertise, ideology/politics, identity formations, and fiction. The material we study include dialogue in social media, fiction in different media, and policy documents. Analysis methods come from critical and visual rhetoric; literary and cultural analysis; historical studies; critical discourse analysis and social semiotics. We collaborate and are in dialogue with other sustainability-oriented research groups and research environments within and outside the Department of Humanities, Education, and Social Sciences.

Schedule for Sustainability Centered Humanities