Understanding Sustainability: Conversations, Values, Motifs, Barriers, and Enablers of (Un)Sustainable Everyday Practices

Sustainability, the guiding principle of the new millennium, increasingly sits at the core of political, corporate, and wider societal discourses. Communication is fundamental for sustainable development, not only in the sense of knowledge and information transfer, or of the creation of awareness by placing sustainability and its related issues on both the public and political agenda, but also in order to initiate a process of social change towards a sustainable society and lifestyle. Thus, communication plays a key role in transformation processes, since sensemaking happens as a social process in which perspectives, standpoints, and orientations are (communicatively) exchanged, on a systemic, organizational, and inter- and intrapersonal level.

Critical and conversational approaches to communication link individuals to cultural patterns, rituals, and societal discourses and offer frameworks to investigate collective as well as individual meaning-making related to normative frameworks like sustainability. Thus, they can help understand how individuals and groups understand, elaborate, transform and communicate sustainability and (about) their (un)sustainable everyday practices and consumption choices and how they construct their sustainability-related social reality.

Within this Research Topic, we welcome projects and concepts, ideas and findings from a critical, social constitutive and conversational perspective. Understanding sustainability as norm, as moral compass of individual practices means including related networks of ideas, narratives and metaphors, as well as images which are more or less loosely tied together. We are interested in complementing various perspectives on sustainability as system of opinions, values, ideas, beliefs, knowledge and practices that establish an order for individuals to orientate themselves in society and provide criteria to determine, justify and legitimate certain behavior, a reason behind decisions or behaviors, i.e., regarding eating and general consumption and buying choices and habits, mobility and transportation selection, as well as all other everyday actions and practices that (may) have a direct or indirect impact towards sustainable development.

This Frontiers Research Topic aims at contributing to investigate what individuals and collectives mean by 'sustainability,' and how this is negotiated in, and transformed by, (everyday) conversations into what is perceived as common sense.

Since sustainability communication is trans- and interdisciplinary by nature, we welcome contributions from areas such as communication, sociology, psychology, business, and marketing as well as linguistics; moreover, there might be interest in the areas of art and writing or politics and political communication.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• framing of sustainability
• narratives of sustainability
• metaphors of sustainability
• rhetoric of sustainability
• sustainability as ideology
• selling sustainability
• moral licensing
• sustainable consumption
• sustainable tourism
• creating health and wellbeing
• technology for sustainability (gamification, app development, etc.)
• sustainability education and critical pedagogy
• culture jamming and revolutionary approaches.

Acknowledgments: The editors are thankful to Stella Lemke, Senior Associate Scientist at the University of Lübeck, who has played an essential part in designing the proposal. Ms. Lemke will assist the editors as a project coordinator by reviewing relevant manuscripts as well as ensuring that authors will submit their manuscript before the deadlines.