Arts and creative approaches to mainstreaming sustainable consumption—Call for papers

8-10 April 2025 | Lund, Sweden

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While the issues and potential solutions for current consumption patterns are well-understood, successful sustainable consumption campaigns remain rare. This conference addresses the challenges, strategies, and successes in the field. We invite researchers and practitioners to submit abstracts for the SCORAI 2025 Conference session, led by Dr. Anastasia Loukianov, discussing the role of arts and creative approaches in mainstreaming sustainable consumption.

CUSP Session

The arts and creative practices remain under-theorised in sustainable consumption research. Yet, they have an important role to play in envisioning, transitioning to, and enacting more sustainable futures. Indeed, it is increasingly clear that transitions to sustainable living must be supported by broad-reaching visions and stories of what it means to live well, and the arts have been proposed as key candidates for generating such visions and stories.

Currently, much of humanity lives by the understanding that consumerism is a main pathway to happiness and fulfilment. Taking the arts and creative practices in a broad sense to refer to traditional artistic activities (e.g. painting, writing), everyday creative activities (e.g. taking pictures, social media posts), and arts-based and creative methods, this session aims to explore how such practices can help us shift away from this understanding. Notably, the session is interested in how such practices can offer valuable opportunities for generating new bottom-up understandings, engaging in participatory learning, imagining more sustainable consumption futures, and disseminating productive understandings to wide audiences.

This session invites both academics and practitioners to reflect on past and current experiences with the arts and creative practices in sustainable consumption research and advocacy. These experiences can involve the use of arts-based and creative methods for studying sustainable consumption practices, disseminating findings via artistic and creative means, or studying the portrayal of (un)sustainable consumption in art.

Taking the arts and creative practices seriously, the session seeks reflections on successes and on challenges and limitations of such approaches to imagining, bringing about, and mainstreaming sustainable consumption. Research beyond the field of sustainable consumption has previously argued that arts and creative practices can contribute to representation, imagination, sensing and experience, dissemination, and democratisation of concepts and knowledges. As arts-based and creative approaches are attracting growing interest from sustainable consumption researchers, it becomes critical that their potentials and limitations be considered in this field.

Accordingly, the session invites participants to reflect on the following themes:

How are the arts and creative practices already used in the representation and communication of (un)sustainable consumption? How is (un)sustainable consumption represented and who creates the representations?

How can the arts and creative practices support a democratic engagement with sustainable consumption futures? How does this relate to mainstreaming sustainability?

How can the arts and creative practices support grasping what living more sustainably would mean and feel? How do existing mainstream artistic norms enable and constrain this potential?

More broadly, what are the relationships between arts, imagination, and creativity, and do the arts have privileged relationships to these coveted qualities?

Submission

To submit your abstract, you need to log into your conference account, or create a new account on the SCORAI website. For inquiries about this session, please email info@cusp.ac.uk.