ABSTRACT
Although concerns regarding the nature and role of science in relation to ecological problems and societal transformation have a much longer history,1 this debate has intensified in recent years as contested notions of environment and sustainability/sustainable development have increasingly been adopted from within the academic community and become a prominent issue for international policy making. Against this background, SHE has recently emerged as an academic field of inquiry and engagement, which is concerned with both the scholarlyprofessional and practical-administrative implications of socio-ecological crisis. Overall, it seeks to create an academe that is more relevant to, if not responsible for, a more democratic and ecologically sensitised social order. In spite of its relative infancy SHE is a complex field with blurred boundaries (e.g. with
respect to its ‘siblings’ environmental education [EE] and education for sustainable development [ESD]) and varying interpretations of its (academic) nature and role vis-à-vis the socio-ecological. Thus, whilst it may be relatively incontrovertible to suggest that the current ‘sustainability imperative’ implies ‘a need to rethink the meaning of research and the relationship of research and teaching’ (Wals and Blewitt 2010: 69), it should be noted that ‘the sustainability in higher education research spectrum is vast, with scientific inquiry taking many different forms and pathways – with respect to research paradigms, designs,methodology and empirical work, theoretical conceptual foundations and theory building, and its practical goals and aspirations’ (Beringer and Adomßent 2008: 607). Primarily this has to do with the complex character of sustainability/sustainable development individually and in relation to each other as well as in relation to ‘academe’ (cf. Beringer and Adomßent 2008; Gough and Scott 2007; Corcoran and Wals 2004). SHE has thus emerged as a contested field, in which ongoing discursive and social (re-)significations processes continue to contribute to development and difference. The following section very briefly introduces some of the major institutional influences that seem to have shaped the emergence of the field.
