Calls for cultural engagement in sustainability are growing as global ecological crises continue to escalate and efforts to foster sustainability lag. Scholars are increasingly encountering ways in which the arts and environmental sustainability can intersect to advance new forms of engagement and insight toward sustainability goals. However, scholarship at this intersection is highly cross-disciplinary and disparate as a result. This article initiates an exercise of conceptualizing the scholarly field of Sustainability and the Arts (SATA). The research presented here explores literature on the core concepts of sustainability, the arts, and scholarship, and seeks to examine the spaces where these concepts intersect. Understanding this scholarly landscape will be critical to identifying priorities for making impactful and significant scholarly contributions in an emerging field. Literature was collected through snowball sampling and targeted literature searches, with the goal of identifying foundational and influential texts informing how these concepts are framed in diverse contexts. From the literature, we outline some of the key elements that characterize each of these concepts and complicate their operationalizations. This article articulates the first functional definition for SATA as a field which integrates traditional and expanded understandings of scholarship and the arts, applying these combined capacities through the lens of sustainability. We characterize SATA as a cross-disciplinary, emergent, and pluriversal scholarly field. This research provides critical insight to scholars and artists working in SATA, allowing for a cohesive body of scholarly work which can amplify the impact of collaborative activities between the arts and environmental sectors.
Bugg et al. (Fri,) studied this question.