Date : Sep 26, 2025

Time : 17:00- 19:00 PM

Abstract
When we ask about the role of education in the sustainability of cultural institutions, we are asking several questions at once, each implying a different vision of what education is and what it is for. While many learning institutions provide sustainability training and certification, this roundtable is dedicated to research, arts, and cultural institutions that cultivate—explicitly or implicitly—an ecological conscience, a critical outlook, and a creativity that sustains “a relationship with a network of life.”

This discussion is set to look in two directions: how to sustain the institution and ensure its future? And how can the institution, as a social agent, teach and promote values, visions, and designs for sustainability itself? How is institutional reproducibility different from institutional sustainability? Do measures for sustainable development risk creating new dependencies that leave the institution vulnerable? Finally, we must also ask: sustainability of what, for whom, and why? What artistic interventions, spatial designs, and forms of fundamental research can foster resilience and open new futures for humanity?

Main questions for discussion

1. When we think about formal educational institutions such as universities, what changes are needed to prepare for today’s challenges, and in what ways should they evolve?
2. Museums and universities have historically enjoyed a seemingly unshakable public trust—part of a political ecology we may have taken for granted. How do we respond to the new atmosphere of lies, “post-truths,” and fake news, and its threat to trust and to truth itself? Does it affect how you communicate, who supports you, and with whom you collaborate?
3. We entered the technological revolution—the internet’s promise of inclusion, equal access, and social media as a tool for connection and solidarity—with wide eyes. Yet modernity and its Enlightenment ideals—Progress, Equality, Democracy, Individualism—have failed us, leaving the planet itself endangered. How can culture, design, and research intervene to create alternative futures?