Campus sustainability at the edges: Emotions, relations, and bio-cultural connections

Abstract

The university campus is often considered a key site for the development of environmental sustainability initiatives. At the same time, the concept and practice of sustainability has been critiqued for its lack of conceptual clarity and its proneness to co-optation by neoliberal institutions and organizations. Using a just sustainabilities framework, this article strives to respond to this tension by exploring the possibility of a campus sustainability at the edges, one that is interested in engaging the broader socio-spatial context of a university as well as in tapping into the emotional and relational realms of fostering more sustainable socio-ecological assemblages. Through a case study analysis of the Philadelphia Urban Creators (PUC), a youth-led organization operating within the Temple University-North Philadelphia interface, I find that grassroots sustainability actors possess important knowledge for understanding how sustainability can be a tool for restoring emotional affinity with the environment as well as for enacting transformative socio-ecological change in the urban university context and beyond. Through these explorations, my purpose is twofold: (1) to envision a more diverse, inclusive, and meaningful campus sustainability model that seeks to confront urban crises such as gentrification, racialized poverty, and mass incarceration, and (2) to incorporate emotion and affect geographies into the just sustainabilities research agenda.