We welcome you to join us in Hiroshima, Japan for the 6th Asian Conference on the Social Sciences and Sustainability (ACSUS 2019) on Friday and Saturday, August 30-31, 2019 at the Mitsui Garden Hotel Hiroshima. This conference will be held jointly with the 6th Asian Conference on the Arts, Humanities and Sustainability (ACAHS 2019).

Last year, this conference preceded the annual Hiroshima Peace Memorial Ceremony; however, we have decided to hold ACSUS at the end of August when temperatures are more reasonable and travel costs are lower. All attending participants will have an opportunity for travel around Hiroshima, including its two UNESCO World Heritage Sites: Peace Park and the Shrine Island of Miyajima (Itsukushima).

Please note that the number of oral and poster time slots is limited. The organizers will close submissions and registration when the event has reached its capacity.

About ACSUS 2019

Sustainability is a term of recent origin with widespread contemporary saliency. In its popular use, sustainability tends to focus mostly on issues of natural environment. The lens of environmental sustainability raises questions such as:

Can the natural world recover from damage caused by human activity at a rate faster than the damage is done?
Is the use of natural resources at a rate that is compatible with their regeneration?
What changes in human practice can lead to long-term availability of necessary natural resources?

ACSUS 2019 will explore these and related questions, but in a way that considers sustainability beyond its ecological dimensions. Trends toward broader consideration of sustainability are in place. The World Bank and other governmental and non-governmental organizations have incorporated the concept of social sustainability into their approaches to development. The notion of a “triple bottom line” that considers profit, people and planet has entered the private sector discourse on sustainability. This conference considers the contributions that anthropology can make to expanding the horizons of sustainability.

Sustainability has been often viewed as primarily an environmental issue and approached from an intra-disciplinary quantitative perspective. The United Nations, however, has been working to change this perception and draw attention to a diverse range of issues beyond just problems related to the environment. As an example, the United Nations recently developed a method for understanding, assessing and managing projects directed towards socially sustainable outcomes: the Circles of Sustainability. This method identified four core areas of sustainability, which are rooted in the social sciences: economic, social, ecological and cultural. Additional concepts between sustainability and the social sciences include education, human rights, law, public policy, politics, linguistics and archaeology, to name a few.

With it’s theme of Intersections of Holistic Sustainability, the 6th Asian Conference on the Social Sciences and Sustainability welcomes innovative technical approaches, but also encourages diverse views and analysis procedures, including qualitative and mixed methods. We seek to create a learning environment where participants can share their research and discuss trans-disciplinary ideas to propose solutions to today’s increasingly complex sustainability problems.

We welcome proposals of 250 words in English by Friday, July 12, 2019.