Click on the audio below to listen the short introduction of the first season of the TrUST podcast!

Hi. I am Giulia Sonetti, creator of the TrUST Podcast community: welcome!

TrUST is a research project aiming at better understanding of how to achieve more efficient and effective inter/trans-disciplinary research and education for urban sustainability transitions.

TrUST is also a platform of sustainability believers, practitioners and academics sharing similar values and approaches for transformative learning and collaboration.

The TrUST podcast started in 2020, in the full pandemic. Connections were urgently needed and I was wondering:

how could I create something that really reflects my thoughts on sustainability education now, and at the same time be a careful company to glue the TrUST community and students around current disruptions?

I knew I couldn’t have started it off on the right foot without my friends and colleagues. Then, Maria Garcia Alvarez, Valerie Adolff and me started brainstorming about which format, structure, length and topics the TrUST podcast should have. The original idea evolved over time - the first one we launched has not the audio quality we wanted, but in COVID times, many things would not go the way we expected.  Nevertheless, we kept that trial episode because of the inspiring and genuine environment generated among our first guests, talking about fears, worries and hopes for a truly sustainable common future. 

Indeed, we realised that the juice of the TrUST podcast was and it is exactly this: to offer a safe space to dialogue around disconnection and re-connection of our present time. 

I wanted to start spontaneously more than crafting the perfect podcast, and thanks to the funding from the Politecnico di Torino Department of Regional and Urban Studies, we’ve recorded a handful of episodes with the help of Donatella, Sharon, Carina and Sani, our enthusiastic internship students.   

To give it more a polished feel, I choose an intro and outro from the last album of Accordi and Disaccordi, a jazz band based in Turin; then I asked Philippa Collins, an urban anthropologist at the Inholland University, to describe a foto chosen to represent the topic of each episode, without naming it, but just referring to an image, and using it to start a dialogue from the emotions arising by looking at and listening to the picture.

Inspired by the “Ego to Eco framework” of the Theory-U, by the Presenting Institute, we decided to involve always at least one practitioner, one academic and one student in the conversation to be true to hear all voices of the social field. In fact, the first series of the TrUST podcast follows the “iceberg model” of the current socioeconomic system. We assume that beneath the visible level of events and crises, there are underlying structures, mental models, and sources that are responsible for creating them. If ignored, these deeper layers of reality will keep us locked into (re-enacting) old patterns again and again. 

And so, the mission of this podcast: to shed a light on the role of academia in the ecological, social, and spiritual divides (episodes 2, 3 and 4) of our present time.

The opening episode (1) frames the whole landscape of issues and pathologies that constitute the three divides into sustainability education, not reducing it in teaching how green should be your street or how smart your home should be, or how circular your economy should be or how resilient you should be, but really delving into the structure that supports existing patterns.

The episode (5) tries to reconnect the threads with basically two words for sustainability education: ethics of care. If we want to transform how our society responds to those disruptions, we need to understand the deeper structures that we continue to collectively re-enact, the complexity around them, and, for the academics, how a radical, transformative change can be fostered via three mutually reinforcing dimensions: (a) ethically informed practices; (b) relational response-ability; and (c) emotional awareness, an approach beautifully explored by Angela Moriggi in her SUSPLACE research.

The last two episodes on Transition and Urban Transformations try to close the U-path that was guiding us in this first season of the TrUST podcast, which comes to an end like this 2021. In fact, we wanted to first explore, with practitioners and experts and students, the doom and gloom scenarios along with the three main disruptions (social, ecological and spiritual) we are witnessing in this last year, but I also want to plant seeds of hope on how we should aim for large-scale transformations and transitions, starting from the privileged position of being human being working on sustainability research and education.

We are really excited about how this podcast evolved and the motivation of the speakers to share their experiences. We hope it will inspire you as much as us, either while chopping the carrot for your soup, or triggering the discussion in your classroom with your students, or getting to know better the small/big actions of researchers, free-lances, students, explorers and artisans of sustainability that are forming the TrUST tribe.