The present call aims to broaden the scope of the social dimension of sustainability to aspects related to mediatization and culturalization. In order to go beyond the vision of social sustainability based on equity and the fight against social exclusion (Lafferty, 2004), this Special Issue intends to offer a vision based on the analysis of sustainability from relations and social practices in media and cultural terms – that is to say, what we call a mediatiatization and culturalization of sustainablity (Parra and Moulaert, 2011). Current research on mediatization (Hjarvard, 2011; Lövheim and Lynch, 2011; Schofield, 2011; Couldry, 2012; Bratosin, 2016; Gomes, 2016; Lövheim, 2011; Lövheim and Lundmark, 2019) has shown how the mediatization process impacts the role of media in framing, constructing the meaning of, and transforming contemporary societies characterized by the “mediatization of everything” (Livingstone, 2009; Bratosin, 2016). The mediatization, used “to analyse critically the interrelation between changes in media and communications on the one hand, and changes in culture and society on the other” (Couldry and Hepp, 2013, p. 196), is particularly relevant for the study of social sustainability. The transdisciplinary nature of the recent international interest in the study of the mediatization of social sustainability covers and contains the ordinary need of social sciences to question and provide elements of response to the necessity to reconsider the paradigm itself of clarification and understanding of the environment, society, and the economy in line with the injunctions for changes imposed by the technological innovations that mark the second decade of the 21st century. The media treatment of social sustainability in favor of the development of social media and new information and communication technologies introduces into the democratic and scientific debate a major cognitive discontinuity, very little taken into account, which raises many questions, on the one hand, of ideological nature, but also of educational, epistemological, and methodological, and on the other hand, of producing scientific meaning in many fields of expertise such as information and communication sciences, sociology, anthropology, politics, law, management sciences, economics, psychology, philosophy, etc. This is an issue that appears even more profound and complex when we observe that the mediatization of social sustainability is not only the effect of a change in the way of considering the relations among the environment, society, and the economy, but also a mean of transforming the content of these reports and above all of producing mutations in the very content of daily behavior, of power in the public sphere, and of leadership – an issue also at the center of many research projects bringing together scientific perspectives that are very complementary through their diversity and through cultural geo-contextualization. In order to account for this, this Special Issue of Sustainability sets out to bring together societies and cultures from the North and the South by joining work on the mediatization of social sustainability of scholars participating in various disciplinary fields. The objective is double: a) to explore the social construction of scenarios for the future, expectations on the horizon, roadmaps for the future, mediatized futuristic promises, etc. in order to observe the imaginary at work in the offer of media content relating to the materiality of sustainability, and b) to question the contribution of the media to the birth and development of ideologies related to sustainability and on the economic, ethical, psychological, political, etc. importance of this development inducing changes in interactions and social practices. This thematic issue is also open to other questions that would bring theoretical, empirical proposals, and cases studies likely to advance research in this field.
Keywords: Economy; Environment; Future; Ideology; Journalism; Governance; Mediatization; New information and communication technologies; Culture; Social sustainability; Social media; Socioecological systems; Sustainable development; Socioecological transformations; Socioecological research on lifestyles; Regulations of societal relations to nature; Resource management; Inter- and transdisciplinary sustainability studies; Society-nature interaction; Social ecology; Human ecology; Political ecology.