ABSTRACT
The notion of sustainability has been a potent discourse across academic and professional domains calling attention to unsustainable human development on a finite planet. A range of actors and institutions have enlisted the idea of sustainability to mobilize an environmental movement to address our worsening global ecological crises, from climate change to species extinction. Yet after more than 40 years of mobilizing “sustainability talk,” there is a widespread recognition that the discourse of sustainability is failing to live up to its promise. Indeed, for many, the discourse has more often served to facilitate the continuation of an unsustainable and unjust global economy as it has been appropriated by neoliberal policies and practices to greenwash business-as-usual. This chapter offers a theoretical overview of recent critical on the discourse of sustainability, with a particular focus on the ways language and communication scholars have critically adapted sustainability discourse to address the role of language education, intercultural communication, and sociolinguistic justice in promoting a more sustainable and equitable society. To illustrate the methodological implications of these interventions into sustainability discourse within language and communication, this chapter draws upon the author’s ethnographic and linguistic landscape data from ecotourism and conservation settings where sustainability discourse is mobilized to shape linguistically and culturally diverse interactions around wildlife and nature. Here, sustainability emerges as a more-than-human contact zone of competing interests and imagined futures. The author argues that rather than moving beyond sustainability in search of alternative terms, language and communication scholars should reclaim the term, building on the field’s empirical focus on everyday language practices of learning and use as being of broad relevance to a wide range of societal issues including sustainability, prompting interdisciplinary discussions to reimagine what needs to be sustained and cared for in the Anthropocene.
