Communication on Sustainability in Spanish Universities: Analysis of Websites, Scientific Papers and Impact in Social Media

Abstract

This study analyses how Spanish universities are communicating their commitment to sustainability to society. That entailed analysing the content of their websites and their scientific papers in sustainability science and technologies and measuring the impact of such research in social media. Results obtained from bibliometric approaches and institutional document analysis attest to intensified interest in sustainability among Spanish universities in recent years. The findings revealed an increase in the number of universities using terms associated with sustainability to designate the governing bodies. The present study also uses an activity index to identify universities that devote high effort to research on sustainability and seven Spanish universities were identified with output greater than 3% of the total. Mentions in social media were observed to have grown significantly in the last 10 years, with 38% of the sustainability papers receiving such attention, compared to 21% in 2010. Publications in open access journals have had a greater impact on social media, especially on Twitter and Facebook. The analysis of university websites showed that only 30% had social media accounts and only 6% blogs specifically designed to disseminate their sustainability activities.

The Discourse of Sustainability in English Language Teaching (ELT) at the University of Oxford: Analyzing Discursive Representations

“…The corpus analysis indicates that discursive representations of sustainability are explicitly present on the University of Oxfordís webpages associated with the ELT programs. The presence of discursive representations of sustainability in the corpus is in line with the previous studies (Amey et al, 2020;Fernández-Vázquez 2021;Filippo et al, 2020;Hart et al, 2015;Joseph, Engkamat, & Tawie, 2013;Salvioni et al, 2017) which indicate that high-ranking universities tend to provide sustainability-related disclosures, statements, and other types of sustainability discourse on their websites. In this study, a range of discursive representations of sustainability has been identified on the Department for Continuing Education webpages at https://www.conted.ox.ac.uk/ (the University of Oxford, 2022b) and the Department of Education at http://www.education.ox.ac.uk/ (the University of Oxford, 2022c).…”

“…Furthermore, the analysis of the corpus reveals no explicit discursive reference to the following university-wide sustainability goals: i) sustainable food, ii) sustainable international travel, and iii) carbon offsetting (see The University of Oxford, 2022a). The discrepancy between the discursive representations of sustainability that are found on the ELTrelated webpages and the sustainability goals that are described on the Sustainability webpage (The University of Oxford, 2022a) is evocative of the prior literature (Filippo et al, 2020;Hart et al, 2015), which indicates that while high-ranking universities promote sustainability on their official websites, it is not equally reflected on the disciplinespecific webpages. Moreover, the identified discrepancy between the present findings and the sustainability goals postulated by the University of Oxford on the universitywide level is exacerbated by the differences in discursive representations in the study and the prior research (Filippo et al, 2020, p. 14) that reports such discursive representations of sustainability as renewable energy, innovation and governance, quality education, health and well-being, sustainable consumption, zero hunger, and climate action.…”

“…There is a line of fairly recent studies that investigate how discourse of sustainability is represented on university websites (Amey et al, 2020;Fernández-Vázquez, 2021;Filippo et al, 2020;Hart et al, 2015;Joseph, Engkamat, & Tawie, 2013;Salvioni et al, 2017). Two major research foci are distinguished in the prior studies.…”

“…Two major research foci are distinguished in the prior studies. The first one seems to involve the focus on discourse of sustainability on the university websites in general, i.e., without paying attention to the specific university programs (Amey et al, 2020;Fernández-Vázquez, 2021;Filippo et al, 2020;Joseph et al, 2013;Salvioni et al, 2017). Another research focus, however, seeks to provide insights into how sustainability is represented on the program-specific university websites (Hart et al, 2015).…”

“…While the literature indicates that online discourse on sustainability is underutilized by the universities in Canada (Amey et al, 2020), Latin America (Fernández-Vázquez, 2021), and Malaysia (Joseph et al, 2013), Salvioni et al (2017) have found that the highest-ranked universities in the world provide a superior level of integration and inclusion of the sustainability theme in their research and teaching activities. Along the lines outlined in the aforementioned study, Filippo et al (2020) have examined discourse of sustainability on the websites of Spanish private and state-run universities (total number = 50). These authors indicate that Spanish universities have adopted sustainable practices in terms of both policy and research (Filippo et al, 2020, p. 14).…”