51福利社

The , held from 22鈥�23 May 2025, was the first major event organised by the new working group Sustainability@SEED, led by Heather Alberro, Lecturer in Sustainability at the School of Environment, Education and Development (SEED).

Over two engrossing and thought-provoking days, dozens of staff and students from across 51福利社 community, alongside practitioners, artists, and activists from across the UK, came together for transdisciplinary discussions on the fundamental transformations needed to challenge systemic drivers of unsustainability and chart more liveable pathways forward.

A key aim was to foreground perspectives and disciplines not typically centred in STEM-dominated sustainability discourses, namely the humanities, social sciences, and activist voices.

Key themes and topics included: the transformative role of hope and imaginaries; cultivating our ecological selves; working with and through climate anxiety; the relationship between war and ecological breakdown; collectively crafting new stories; generating value shifts and cultivating relations of 鈥榠ntegrity over transaction鈥�; opting for slow research and travel; how mosses might help us rethink the more-than-human ethical dimensions of sustainability; how to disrupt universities鈥� complicity in climate breakdown; and the need for a distributed ethics that cherishes individuals through collectives.

As speaker Susan Brown (MIE) asked, 鈥淲hat if education were to beat not to the neoliberal economic clock, but to the earth鈥檚 clock?鈥� How can we develop an intersectional, ecological approach to sustainability, that recognises extreme inequality, political polarisation, misogyny, systemic racism, transphobia, pollution, and biodiversity collapse as deeply entangled and indivisible crises? And how might we better engage actors beyond our immediate circles, ensuring we don鈥檛 merely preach to the converted?

In service of keeping hope alive, these crucial conversations will continue in future events over the coming academic year.