Night of sustainable conversations

Franzisca Weder, Ursula Lutzky, Julia Stranzl, Florentina Höhs, Mathew Gillings

The Long Night of Research provides its visitors with the possibility to learn more about research carried out at WU, and it provides us as researchers with the possibility to talk about our projects, study results and ideas in plain language. It enables us to reach out to people of all ages and ideally spark curiosity in those people who may not be familiar with our field of research.  On Friday, 24 May 2024, visitors to the Long Night of Research were given the opportunity to approach the topic ‘sustainable communication’ by taking part in a range of different activities, including painting and taking part in quizzes. They documented their associations and thoughts on sustainability on a long piece of cloth, they extended the Spotify playlist ‘Sounds like Sustainability’, discussed gender aspects for sustainability related career roles and had a critical look at reports on climate change in the media. This year’s Long Night of Research was a success, with good feedback, good laughs and sustainable conversations!

Sustainability is still a ‘wicked term’, a term that all of us are able to define, even if the definitions vary from each other.  From a linguistic and communication science perspective, the following observation is particularly intriguing: even though sustainability has in fact a normative dimension and thus is action-oriented at its core, the term is often used in strategic communication, for example to ‘greenwash’ a company or to better sell a specific product. Studying sustainability communication, with a special focus on language and speech acts, aims to address the complexity of the concept, but also the ambivalences of the respective actions and decisions. At our stall at the Long Night of Research we introduced a number of activities, in which visitors could take part, that helped us to turn the spotlight on these ambivalences and dissonances and to underline the role of communication in transformation processes in society. See below for an overview of the activities we prepared for our visitors, each based on a question that was meant to spark further reflection. :)
 

What are your first associations or pictures in your head, when you come across the word “sustainability”?

The visitors of our stall at the Long Night of Research were provided with space to depict their thoughts in words and pictures on one of our partition walls as well as on a sheet on the floor. The drawings that showed the participants’ individual and loving relationships to nature were particularly remarkable. We furthermore found that keywords such as “recycling”, but also “responsibility”turned out to be directly related to sustainability. Among others, the term “greenwashing” was discussed and led to a critical debate about the promotional nature of sustainability communication.  It was interesting to observe that it was the group of young visitors that regarded social sustainability as more important than aspects of environmental protection or climate change, respectively.

Which songs come to your mind, when you think of sustainability?

Apart from the lively discussions with the team, our stall’s visitors could listen to a playlist of songs that continued to grow during the evening. The Spotify channel ‘Sounds like Sustainability’ (see below for the QRcode) offered them an assorted array of songs that were somehow connected to sustainability. The playlist ranged from Michael Jackson’s ‘Earth Song’ to New Zealand reggae and rock from The Feelers.

Which new professional roles emerge from the need for sustainability management in companies?

Based on a recent research project on the currently developing professional field of sustainability managers or sustainability representatives in companies, our stall’s visitors were asked to take part in a short quiz.

The participants were given a description of the activities and responsibilities of a person working in sustainability management in a company, without giving the person’s job title or gender (the fictitious person’s name was Alex and thus gender neutral). The quiz participants had to find a job title for and guess the gender of the fictitious person. The job title given was very often one from communications (PR, communications manager with and without sustainability focus, see Table 1 below); it was interesting to observe that – as was the case already for the first activity at our stall – it was mainly the group of young visitors that selected ‘gender neutral’ or ‘binary’ for the fictitious person, or decided to assign no gender at all (female: 17, male: 18, diverse: 5; rest: not assigned; n = 51).

Table 1.: Job titles resulting from the quiz describing the activities and responsibilities of a sustainability manager, n = 51

It was remarkable that our stall’s visitors and quiz participants did not only know new professional roles such as that of the sustainability manager, but also took a very critical stance towards this professional role, often using terms such as “greenwasher”, “chief disinformation officer”, or “sustainable evangelist” to describe it.
 

What about news reports on the climate crisis?

For the last activity at our stall, visitors were given the opportunity to analyze German and English language reports on the climate crisis in newspapers. Together with the team the texts were analyzed with a focus on the language used to emphasize the urgency of the topic (e.g. through adjectives with a negative meaning, such as “terrifying” or “world-ending”). The visitors could also observe how this message may be underlined by multimodal elements (e.g. pictures or videos of forest fires or floodings illustrating the varying effects of the climate crisis). At the same time, newspapers included reports that made positive associations with climate change, for example associating it with the warm weather lasting well into autumn and providing us with longer periods of sun light. A detailed language analysis of media reports on the climate crisis allows for the discourses connected with this topic to be revealed and offer a critical glance at its depiction in the media.