Sustainable Transitions in Culture & Societies (STiCS)

Sustainable Transitions in Culture & Societies

This research cluster brings together researchers who take cultural, historical, economic, and media perspectives to investigate the urgent sustainability transitions required to tackle the most complex environmental and societal challenges. The climate emergency and growing social inequalities demand that, from the production to the delivery of goods and services, from lifestyle choices to consumption practices, negative environmental and social impacts are more transparently accounted for and brought within the boundaries that allow our planet and societies to thrive.

The research carried out within STICS explores urgent sustainability transitions from the following angles:

• Integrating sustainability in production processes, from sustainable value chains, product of service, to Corporate Social Responsibility and corporate morality
• Exploring sustainability values in relation with consumer culture
• Engaging with sustainability in social movements and bottom-up practices, like activism, grassoroots organisations
• Exploring discourses and sense-making surrounding sustainability transitions
• Revising sustainability paradigms in a cross-cultural perspective, understanding how current thinking and theorizing on sustainability reproduces particular worldviews
• Communicating on sustainability, from media coverage, sustainable art, and art-science collaborations

Projects within this cluster

• Behind the scenes in Dutch fashion; Bridging the gap between independent fashion designers, craftsmen and fashion intermediaries
• Crafting Future Urban Economies
• CultSense
• Imagining climate change: The visual arts to the rescue?
• Re-Frame Fashion: Sustainability, Entrepreneurship and Heritage
• Communicating sustainability in an intercultural context
• FABRIX – Fostering local, beautiful, and sustainably designed regenerative textile & clothing ecosystems 
• Urban Tourism: Towards Sustainable Development Models.
• Sustainability in the classical music sector

Header image by Uli Hahn