Environmental Studies and Sustainability Science: Sustainability and Popular Culture

<p>Sustainability discourses are increasingly embedded in culture across its multiple dimensions, including different worldviews and values, and ways of life. This increase in sustainability discourse in society's daily practices might contribute to shifting the current unsustainable trajectory.</p><p>For this course, popular culture is defined as the entirety of attitudes, ideas, images, perspectives, and other phenomena that are within the mainstream of a given Culture. The most common pop culture categories are: entertainment, sports, news, politics, and fashion.</p><p>The course aims to increase your awareness and understanding of popular culture and its representations of sustainability and nature.</p><p>The course is divided into three parts:</p><p>Part 1 will provide an overview of the competing theories and concepts surrounding popular culture and its linkages with sustainability.</p><p>Part 2 examines case studies, such as sustainable fashion, food, political campaigns, and advertising, and critically analyses how they represent sustainability. In this part, the complexities of popular culture are in focus. Examples of questions that can be discussed: How advertisement and entertainment influence the ways we imagine nature and the environment; and how ideas about sustainability are communicated in politics through political campaigns.</p><p>Part 3 asks what sustainability studies learn from popular culture, for example, by analysing the media strategies of successful sustainability initiatives. The course will, for example, analyse visual data to understand how visual methods such as photography and documentary film create arenas for the public to engage with and discuss sustainability.</p>