The (Happy) Partnership between Feminism and Sustainability : exploring the potential of filling the gaps in sustainability education with feminist concepts, theories, and methods

In the near future, our species, and many others, face an upcoming shock in the global climate; one that could result in the potential extinction of more than just the human race. In order to combat this issue, the field of sustainability emerged throughout different sectors of society. One of the places that this topic has blossomed is within academia, and there are few things more important than training the future generations to deal with the ongoing issues of climate change, and help the planet, and our species, survive. Scholars within the field, however, have found that sustainability education does not live up to it’s name- with a distinct gap between what it should be, and what it is. These scholars have stated that the reason for this can be seen within very structure of our education system, a structure that has and continues to, according to some, reinforce the issues we deal with today. In the next 40 pages I will bring you through the process of my own research on the subject, starting with a theoretical investigation into the conflicts between the concepts necessary for sustainability education, and norms which are prominent within academia. After finding that there are substantial tensions between the two, I attempt at understanding the problem further by diving into preliminary research on the application of these concepts in sustainability masters programs, via document analysis, finding that there is indeed a gap between theory and practice. After this problem formulation, I bring you to my solution, which is the incorporation of feminist work within sustainability education. Concluding that feminism and sustainability have many conceptual similarities, I conduct a survey with those who have studied the two jointly in a sustainability master’s program environment. The results show us that applying and learning feminist methods, theories, and concepts in a sustainability education atmosphere is highly beneficial, and some respondents even argue, necessary. When observing the gaps in sustainability education along side the areas in which feminism supplements the topic most, we see an area of overlap, offering a potential pathway to improve upon and work towards a more holistic and cohesive implementation of sustainability education