Deployments of Sustainability

“Sustainability” is one of the most widely used concepts of our time. It shapes research agendas, policy decisions, and public debate across the world. Yet its meaning is far from fixed. Rather than describing a single, settled idea, sustainability is constantly (re-?)defined, negotiated, and challenged in different contexts. 

This Advanced Study Group starts from that observation. It treats sustainability not as a given goal, but as something people actively use to organise priorities, justify decisions, and define what should endure, for whom, and under what conditions. 

But these uses do not always align. Institutions, experts, and communities draw on the concept in different ways, often with different consequences. That makes it difficult to assume a shared understanding of what sustainability means or, indeed, what it is meant to achieve

By bringing together perspectives from fields such as technology, medicine, law, ecology, and the social sciences, the ASG examines how sustainability is defined, used, and contested across different areas of research and practice – and what becomes visible when these perspectives are placed side by side. 

The ASG aims to make underlying assumptions visible and open them up for discussion. In doing so, it seeks to create a shared platform for interdisciplinary dialogue and to lay the groundwork for new ways of studying and using sustainability as a concept. 

The Advanced Study Group will:

• Examine how sustainability is defined across disciplines, including the assumptions and histories behind these definitions.
• Explore how sustainability shifts across levels, from individuals to global systems, and what changes in the process.
• Analyse how the concept is used in practice, and what kinds of decisions and priorities it supports.