DePaul University
ER-15: Sustainability Research Identification

Defining sustainability requires an intrinsically interdisciplinary effort, one that builds on concrete connectivities among individuals and groups. The work of such people lays the foundation for establishing, building and maintaining materially, ecologically, socially, economically, culturally and spiritually sustainable communities. Research that supports the sustainability of a community depends on creating and maintaining systems that promote environmental resilience, social equity and broad-based citizen participation. In an era of increasingly scarce resources, sustainability has to be concerned with long-term economic development, which means integrating private and social economic returns. This is research that builds concrete bridges between people, their communities and the ecosystems they depend upon. The communities that together make up DePaul seek to be sustainable in the context of an urban university that plays a key role in the life of Chicago—a global city engaged in the process of becoming an international model of sustainability. These efforts take place in the midst of ongoing tensions between prosperity/poverty, diversity/segregation, and ecosystems/development in a globally connected environment. The project of defining and living out a vision of sustainability is thus one that DePaul engages as a diverse and interdisciplinary group of scholars and learners. It is in this collaborative effort that all the disciplines taught at DePaul come together to become the foundation for building and maintaining sustainability in multiple forms—work that serves to define us as one contiguous community.

We conducted a survey of all teaching faculty at DePaul University in November 2010 (including tenured, tenure-track, and adjunct faculty). In the survey we asked faculty (1) if were aware of any research centers, institutes, or academic units at DePaul that focus on or are related to sustainability; (2) if they have been engaged in research activities in the past three years and if yes, if they have been related to sustainability; (3) if they answered that they had been engaged in sustainability research, we asked them provide the details (e.g., citations) for this research.