ABOUT THE VIRTUAL CONFERENCE: There will be pre-recorded presentations available from 18th May, and live sessions will take place on 20th/21st May.

Full programme details will be sent to all delegates shortly, along with necessary links and instructions on how to participate.

REGISTER HERE FOR THIS FREE EVENT

PLEASE NOTE: Registering here grants you access to any session, pre-recorded or live, which will be available during that week.

Sustainability in Higher Education (SHE) Conference 2020

Today we face multiple challenges – social, economic and environmental – and a growing sense of urgency to act to address these. This was powerfully emphasised recently by Greta Thunberg when speaking at the World Economic Forum.

“I want you to act as if you would in a crisis. I want you act as if the house is on fire, because it is." (2019)

Her words sit against a background of extensive evidence provided by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) reports, which emphasise the need for radical and immediate change to avert environmental crisis. Those working within the context of higher education, are faced with the paradoxical challenge of addressing the urgent global crisis using the “the slow way[s]…” of education (Biesta, 2013:3)

A second challenge relates to the extent to which it is possible (or even desirable) to accept structural and systemic boundaries or whether as Biesta (2015) and others argue, educators have a “duty to resist.” Universities themselves need to change; to push back against “dominant ideologies” of neoliberalism which increasingly drive professional practice (Barnett, 2018:1). This raises questions about the extent to which drivers such as employability, quality, student experience and ranking offer useful opportunities to embed sustainability within university systems and structures or whether they need to be resisted.

These two challenges can be understood as paradoxes (fast/slow; alignment/resistance), which those working in sustainability in higher education must constantly navigate. We must act quickly in an environment that is slow to respond; we must challenge and change the very structures we are working within. We propose a model in the form of a compass focused on these paradoxes. Its aim is to guide decision-making and identify when a particular type of response might be most appropriate. We argue that within the context of global crisis, professional wisdom is an increasingly essential virtue if universities are to be effective leaders in sustainability.

Invitation to participate

We would like to invite you to submit an abstract of no more than 250 words for inclusion in the conference programme. Your paper can be on any aspect of sustainability in higher education but you should indicate which quadrant of the model, you think your paper fits into (slow alignment, slow resistance, fast resistance, fast alignment, individual or societal change/scope). It is intended that there should be a clear outcome to the conference and we plan to collect data in relation to the model from delegates during the day. The ‘paradox model’ will be the subject of a focused discussion at the end of the day and will form the basis for a paper that will be written collaboratively by the conference team after the event.

After the conference, authors will be invited to develop a 6000-8000 words paper based on their presentations for the IJSHE special issue.

Registrations are closed

The fierce urgency of now: Navigating paradoxes in sustainability education