Abstract
While some argue that sustainability is a concept worthy of rescuing the planet from its problems, sustainability itself is in need of rescuing. Sustainability thinking has motivated action in the climate and environment remain, but there is an equal din that critiques the vision of sustainability as weak, inconsistent, harmful, and ultimately futile. While this debate remains to be resolved, many academic institutions have embraced sustainability as central to education, research, and internal management. Radboud University, for example, prepares to launch a new masters in Sustainability Science, will hire a Professor of Enduring Behavior Change for Sustainability, and has instituted the inclusion of sustainability across all curriculum. The danger of mainstreaming sustainability into the core mission of research and teaching is that is serves as an inadequate stand-in for the realm of contested values that higher education could or should pursue. Critics warn that a generation of research and education devoted to an empty concept only risks to further the status quo. If sustainability is to become a positive transformative force, we desperately need a set of epistemological and practical foundations worthy of making sustainability capable of the task it aims to accomplish. In this session we discuss the publication of "The Real Sustainability Challenges: A Manifesto for Politicizing Sustainability in Higher Education," authored by a collective of Radboud researchers and students. We highlight voices from the Manifesto’s author collective paired with a panel response from the academic community. The Manifesto has direct implications for the direction of research and education at Radboud University, an institution branding itself with sustainability. It also provokes a discussion of how the larger academic community navigates the unsteady yet needed terrain of sustainability thinking. The stakes are too high to allow the concept of sustainability to be deployed so casually without critical reflection on what such a commitment truly invokes.
