We are an affiliation of academics and students who are commited to a sustainable University of Münster in their research, teaching and studies. Our projects aim to create a more sustainable university and society.
What we do...
Appetite for the Academic Donut
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Digital Clean Up Week
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Digging for Diversity
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Sowing Seeds for Diversity
How can diversity be made tangible? Students and lecturers explored this question in the real-life experiment ‘Sowing Seeds for Diversity’ on 6 and 13 May - as part of the interdisciplinary course ‘Digging for Diversity - Perspectives on Diversity in Regenerative Societies’.
In two four-hour workshops, the students and lecturers each tried out a deep ecology exercise (Deep Time Walk & Council of All Beings) and then discussed their experiences in a creative and guided way. During the Deep Time Walk around Lake Aa, the 4.6 billion-year history of the Earth was made physically tangible in a 4.6-kilometre walk. Each metre symbolised one million years, with regular stops at which the origin of life was vividly explained. Particularly impressive was the realisation that humanity only appears on the last few centimetres of the route.
Afterwards, the participants used found objects from the path - stones, leaves, shards - as inspiration for creative work with colours, charcoal and other materials. Guided by the illustrator and artist Verena Braun, the participants were able to process the experiences of the walk in a haptic and creative way, to deal with what they had experienced in a different way and from a different perspective and to create something new at the same time. Many participants reported in the following week that the Deep Time Walk had impressed them afterwards and inspired them to change their perspective. Many of them got talking to flatmates and friends about the concept, the experience and possible interpretations.
In the second part of the real-life experiment, the participants formed a ‘Council of all Beings’. During an initial silent exercise, the participants were invited to put themselves in the shoes of an entity of their choice. After an initial individual discussion, the entities came together in small groups to talk about each other, share challenges and deliberate.
The results and reflections of the two real-life experiments in which the workshops took place will be published in a freely available handout in autumn 2025.
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Who we are...
© LATERNE LATERNE
In the project ‘University in the Anthropocene: Lighthouse Adaptation and TransfER for Sustainable Development (LATERNE)’, the Universities of Siegen, Münster and Osnabrück are analysing how lighthouse projects for more sustainability and global justice can be more widely implemented at universities. To this end, they are generating new knowledge about the role of lighthouse projects in university transformation processes at an analytical level with the help of the whole institution approach. Based on this knowledge, an exploration of existing lighthouse projects in the dimensions of research, teaching, operations, governance and transfer and across all hierarchical levels will be carried out at the three participating universities. Subsequently, the partner universities will initiate so-called sustainability workshops in cooperation with non-university institutions located in their regions in order to create new lighthouses in which the broad impact and scalability are considered from the very beginning of the conception.
© SUNRISE Lab SUNRISE
In the project ‘Sustainable University Landscape Münster - Real-world laboratories as drivers of the transformation to sustainable universities’ (SUNRISE LAB), Münster's three major universities (University of Münster, Münster University of Applied Sciences and katho Münster) have joined forces to find out how the universities can make themselves as well as the city of Münster and its surrounding area more sustainable and thus contribute to the sustainability transformation of the city and society as a whole. Using real-world laboratories, practical knowledge is jointly produced with various stakeholders such as academics, non-academic university employees, students and urban society, which can then be applied more comprehensively to institutions such as the university or broader social contexts.
© Pixabay Sustainability governance, networks and practices at universities - a comparative analysis
The aim of the project is to analyse current governance processes, networks and practices at universities that pursue the goal of sustainability. An empirical study will be conducted on the theoretical basis of sociological practice research, governance concepts for universities, network theory, sustainability models and existing research on sustainability practices at universities. In this study, the question is pursued: Which governance processes, network structures and sustainability practices do actors from different university status groups want to use to make universities more sustainable and what specific goals are they pursuing?
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)