Critical Sustainabilities Project (2013)

The Critical Sustainabilities project originated in 2012–2013 as a series of workshops attended by students and faculty at UC Santa Cruz, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, and the University of San Francisco, and supported by the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI). It continues today, in expanded form, through this website. Our participants come from multiple fields—including sociology, anthropology, art, architecture and design, history, environmental studies, urban planning, and geography. We are  engaged in a variety of extra-curricular activities—including urban gardening, documentary film and photography, community organizing, and policy consulting. Across these domains, we have encountered divergent uses of “sustainability,” and wish to take a critical approach to its study, in hopes this might inform future sustainability practice, planning, and policy.