Blog archive
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Inclusive and sustainable futures for Scotland, Pre-election community panel discussion
Thursday 26 March 2026 6:00pm to 7:30pm St Mary’s College, T201 – Lecture Room 1. Scotland has a track record of global impact on matters of sustainability, being one of the first countries to implement legally binding targets (Climate Change Act 2009) and develop a Loss and Damage Fund to support countries experiencing the effects
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Rethinking Sustainability: Challenges, Approaches, and Practice
Following the success of last year’s inaugural edition at St Andrews, StACCS is delighted to announce that we will be co-hosting our second summer school from 22–26 June at the University of Bonn. Our longstanding collaboration with Bonn’s Center for Development Research reflects our shared commitment to exploring alternative approaches to sustainability through interdisciplinary dialogue
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Sustainable Finance Symposium
The Finance Department at the University of St Andrews Business School and Centre for Responsible Banking and Finance (CRBF), in collaboration with Scotland Beyond Net Zero and with support from the St Andrews Centre for Critical Sustainabilities, hosted its Sustainable Finance Symposium on 18 March 2026 as part of the University’s Sustainability Week. The symposium
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Sustainability Showcase
Discover the diversity of sustainability research taking place across the University of St Andrews. Chaired by Prof. Tom Brown, Vice Principal (Research, Collections and Innovation), the event brings together research centres and groups across the university, each offering a short lightning talk that highlights their distinctive approach to sustainability. Organised by the St Andrews Centre for Critical
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Wardlaw Museum exhibition features in Museums Journal this month
Our exhibition ‘Rewrite the Future’ last summer has featured as a case study in Museums Journal, the house journal of the Museums Association. The article, co-written by the Wardlaw Museum’s Head of Experience and Engagement, Matt Sheard, and by Lyndsey Bowditch at the project’s designers Studioarc, focuses on their experimental approach to reducing waste. Usually
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Storytelling as a Method for Sustainability Research
The St Andrews Centre for Critical Sustainabilities (StACCS) invites you to join us for a workshop exploring the value of storytelling as a method for sustainability research. StACCS addresses the challenges of sustainability through interdisciplinary collaboration around the themes of carbon, capital, and community, drawing on methodological principles that reflect on how we do this work:
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Wrapped 2025
As we head toward the end of 2025 and StACCS collaborators are preparing for a well-deserved break, take a look at StACCS Wrapped to learn more about what the StACCS community has achieved this year.
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Roots and Shoots: A StACCS-funded community collaborative pilot project begins
What do sea grass planting, Victorian botanical recipes, fabric dying, the Celtic tree calendar, dulce soup, vernacular plant names and flood alleviation have in common? They are all themes being considered by three community heritage organisations as part of a new UK-wide exploratory project funded by StACCS called “Roots and Shoots: Growing climate resilience and
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Sustainable Finance Symposium
How resilient is our financial system to climate risks? Can the financial sector actively support the transition to a sustainable economy—or does it hinder it? The Department of Finance of the University of St Andrews Business School is bringing together leading academics and experts to explore these critical questions at a one-day Symposium on Sustainable
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A Space for Hope: An Interactive Installation on Climate Hope
Workshop: Thursday 27th November, 6 – 7.30pm Installation: Saturday 29th November 12pm, 1pm, 2pm, 3pm Boiler House, St Andrews Botanic Garden A Space for Hope is an interactive installation which seeks to create space for climate hope amongst increasing climate anxiety. This interactive installation will involve documentary footage, guided movement and creative writing, to encourage reflection on our
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Brainstorming Meeting: Applying to Horizon Europe for Interdisciplinary Sustainability Research
The St Andrews Centre for Critical Sustainabilities (StACCS), in collaboration with the Research Business Development (RBD) team, invite you to attend this brainstorming meeting to discuss Horizon Europe’s Draft Work Programmes for 2026/27, with a view to exploring the possibilities for colleagues at the University of St Andrews to submit collaborative bids. What capacity already exists? Where
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Postcards from the Future
Climate activism frequently involves a focus on the negative; with dire climate news constantly in the media and a discouraging lack of action from government bodies, it becomes easy to focus on what we are trying to prevent rather than the world we hope to build. In this workshop, we are flipping the script. Participants
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StACCS welcomes new team member
We are delighted to announce that we have a new, full-time team member: Dr Edward Christie has joined StACCS as a Research and Engagement Fellow. Edward’s appointment is a significant milestone for the Centre, which will help to accelerate our activities and priorities. Strengthening our commitment to interdisciplinary approaches to sustainability, Edward brings expertise in the arts
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Leading for Tomorrow: an ‘in conversation’ event at the Wardlaw Museum
As part of the StACCS/Wardlaw Museum exhibition Rewrite the Future, StACCS Co-Director Louise Reid and a panel of elected representatives at local and national level will be discussing what kind of future they would like to see, and what it will take to get us there. The event takes place at the Wardlaw Museum at
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StACCS internal project funding call
We are pleased to announce a call for project proposals related to sustainability research, to be led by members of academic staff at St Andrews. We are looking for projects of anywhere between a few hundred pounds and £5000. What do you need to help you get a sustainability research idea off the ground, or
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Rewrite the Future: Wardlaw Museum exhibition opens this weekend
Many of us at StACCS have been busy over the past nine months working with a team from the University’s Wardlaw Museum to put together an exhibition showcasing a range of sustainability-facing research at St Andrews. The exhibition, Rewrite the Future, aims to go beyond the typical focus of the sustainability discourse on environment and
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Inaugural ‘Careful Research’ Spring School
It was a pleasure to host the first of what we hope will be many Spring Schools, working with early career researchers to explore how we can undertake transformative sustainability research in line with our values. The “Critical Sustainability Research: Careful, Participatory, and Emancipatory Research Methods” Spring School was co-developed by StACCS and colleagues at
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What does ‘critical sustainability’ mean? A new StACCS project takes shape
The title of our centre, ‘Critical Sustainabilities’, signals that one of our key aims is to hold the very concept of sustainability up to a critical light. The risk that thinking around sustainability could be watered down is hardly a new concern. Just five years after the Brundtland Report (1986) brought the concept of sustainable
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Call for applications: Careful, Participatory and Emancipatory Research Methods – ‘spring school’
Applications are invited to take part in a four-day in-person workshop or ‘spring school’ in St Andrews on 12-15 May 2025, on the theme “Critical Sustainability Research: Careful, Participatory, and Emancipatory Research Methods”. We are very excited to be running this event in collaboration with our good colleagues at the University of Bonn’s Centre for
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Sustainable Uplands workshop
We were pleased to welcome colleagues Prof Robin Pakeman and Dr Stuart Smith from the James Hutton Institute for a focused workshop at the Botanic Gardens to discuss the science and logistics of long-term experiments and monitoring. JHI has a sizeable network of such long-term studies and we had a very thought-provoking discussion about how