Sapienza's commitment to sustainability has been manifested in recent years through a number of actions: university's policies and plans, increasing involvement of the structures, the provision of innovative courses and the activation of individual practices. However, top-down and technocentric approaches, as well as mainstream practices often result ineffective in the long term. The social sciences suggest that policies need to be tailored to the specificity of different contexts. Community approaches, in this regards, have largely demonstrated that the achievement of sustainable development goals (SDGs) requires a careful understanding of how top-down policies are translated and interact with situated meanings, practices and behaviors.
This project addresses in particular the perception of justice and responsibility, key factors that have theoretical and applied relevance. By looking at Sapienza as a sustainable community in the making, the current project will integrate sustainability studies in higher education institutions with socio-constructivist approaches to sustainable transitions, and it will reach three objectives. 1) Map the social representations of sustainability and SDGs developed by the different components of the Sapienza community (students, teachers, staff); 2) Deepen the role of perceived justice and responsibility in fostering or hindering the adoption of sustainable practices; 3) Propose tools for enhancing communication and public engagement in order to enhance sustainability in higher education institution.
In putting the concepts of justice and responsibility at the centre of attention, the project address a gap in the literature on sustainability in HEIs and provide theoretical, methodological and applied advances.
At the theoretical level, the project is fully within the scope of psycho-social studies on sustainability, and propose an advancement in sustainability studies and HEI.
- Differently from other project in this domain, it will look at Sapienza as a sustainable community in the making and, rather than prescriptive and policy oriented approaches to sustainability in HEIs, it will explore the variety of representations and discourses which already circulate in the University as a learning community.
- By following a socio-constructivist perspective, the project brings into this specific domain contributes from the representational and discursive tradition of studies on sustainability. In this way, the project aims to extend our understanding of individual sustainable behaviours in Higher Education Institutions: they will not be considered as the output of top-down policies or of teaching strategies, on the contrary, they will be considered in the light of the social metasystem in which the members of a specific community called University are embedded.
At the methodological level, the project will connect discursive studies with mainstream individual models of determinants of sustainable behaviours and exploratory techniques typical of social representation approach.
- By exploring the interaction between social representations, shared beliefs and underlying ideological-discursive dimensions, it will contribute to the theoretical debate on the interface between critical discourses analysis and social representation theory. In this perspective, the relationship between sustainability and perceived justice and responsibility in University will be addressed starting from the analysis of how these domains are understood and discursively re-presented by the various components of the University community, starting from key decision makers. The analysis will then connect such discourses with situated and individual perception and practices, in order to understand to what extent meaning making processes reflect in specific behaviours and practices. Although these issues have been captured at the planning level, and although also in Sapienza there have been a number of survey aimed at exploring sustainable practise and support for SDGs, only a few systematic psycho-social studies have been conducted on university members in this perspective (Sonetti, Norton and Sarrica, in press.).
Finally, the research process is intertwined with the many initiatives for sustainability put in place by Sapienza. In this sense the project provides a dual aspect of innovation and application. Looking in a reflective way at our own Institution, it proposes to contribute to the growth of awareness within Sapienza of the mechanisms that favour or hinder the achievement of the sustainable goals. It therefore aims to contribute to the innovation already underway in Sapienza, proposing applicative ideas capable of fostering effective internal communication based on a deeper understanding of the psychosocial mechanisms already put in place by the community itself.