The fierce urgency of now? Navigating paradoxes in sustainability education

This special section of the IJSHE brings together five papers originally presented at the fifth sustainability in higher education (SHE) conference, “The fierce urgency of now? Navigating Paradoxes in Sustainability Education,” hosted by Canterbury Christ Church, UK, in May 2020. Challenged by the words of Greta Thunberg spoken at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2019, our aim was to provide a space to explore the role and responsibility of universities in a time of global crisis and to explore what it means to act as “if our house is on fire”. And then the Covid-19 pandemic struck […] and the focus we had planned took on new relevance. Under lockdown conditions, the conference (and HE more generally) had to move to an online format, and we all found ourselves working in unchartered territory. Although challenging, this opened up unexpected opportunities for colleagues and students from different institutions nationally and internationally to participate, increasing diversity and repositioning the SHE networks as more outward-facing. This apparent contradiction (that is, locking down, opportunities may be opened up) illustrates one of the many apparent paradoxes in the contemporary higher educational landscape.