No justice without sustainability: Taking the climate and environment literally in diversity, equity, and inclusion work.

Abstract

The field of higher education studies has a longstanding interest in the learning environments and campus climates that characterize its institutions and people's experience with them. Yet the reliance on these metaphors, and the prevailing anthropocentric focus on sociocultural dimensions of college that they foster, fails to account for the embeddedness of higher education institutions-like all aspect of human society-in the natural world and the indivisibility of systems of human oppression from those of ecological depredation that give rise to dispossession and marginalization in the first place. In this practice brief, we outline guiding principles and provide resources for action in light of the argument that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) work in higher education is indivisible from sustainability efforts and that both can be understood as complementary principles of justice: social, climate, and environmental alike. We elaborate recommendations, principles, and resources for DEI professionals and researchers to develop a transdisciplinary praxis, collaborate, and advocate for structural changes through a whole institutional approach, and lastly foreground community engagement and boundary-spanning activities. In this way, the article is meant as a call to action to take the climate and environment more literally and thereby move sustainability, climate and environmental justice, and related urgent issues from the programmatic and contextual periphery closer to the heart of the work that all educators, leaders, and administrators do.