HASS Sustainability
Getting sustainability right, in other words, doesn’t mean stepping backwards, but stepping forwards; and the social sciences, arts and humanities have a central role to play in helping to articulate what all this stepping forward means and looks like.
Dr Nick Kirsop-Taylor
HASS Chair of Sustainability
From the climate crisis to the creation of circular economies, so many of the critical global challenges we are currently grappling with lie in the social world. When it comes to sustainability transitions, we social scientists, artists and humanists have a huge amount to offer. We help elucidate the power and institutional structures that enable or hold back sustainability transitions and understand and explain the big history of societies and civilisation on its journey towards more harmonious relations with ecology; our research and teaching gives spaces to imagining alternative futures and possibilities under greater iterations of sustainability and narrate our human stories of progress, technology, the common-wealth and the good life.
In the Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (HASS) at Exeter there is a huge amount of sustainability-facing research, teaching and partnership-working taking place in these areas and many others besides. We are undertaking the University's transformational journey towards nature-positivity and net zero in a ‘uniquely-HASS way’ and one that reflects and represents our unique positions and views as a big-community.
Getting sustainability right doesn’t mean stepping backwards, but stepping forwards; and the social sciences, arts and humanities have a central role to play in helping to articulate what all this stepping forward means and looks like.
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