Critical Sustainabilities is a UCHRI-funded Multi-campus workgroup centered at UC Santa Cruz that connects scholars from different disciplines who study sustainability in order to collaborate and forge a shared vocabulary for common solutions to our collective challenges. The project maps sites where different logics of sustainability—market forces and utopian impulses, for example—overlap, intersect, and collide; these sites serve as inspiration for research into what sustainability really means, and which communities are served by or excluded from prevailing logics of architectural greening, food, social, and environmental justice, and corporate sustainability projects. The project draws in scholars from UC Santa Cruz, UC Davis, UC San Francisco and other institutions in Northern California, as well as community activists from a variety of fields and disciplines.

The project website, which I edit and helped to conceptualize and design, combines a Raymond Williams-style list of keywords related to sustainability, environmentalism, and ecology, with essays on our research sites, and maps and special projects that visualize the concepts.