You will study in a separate centre building, directly seeing only the previous batch and the second LUCSUS program: LUCAS. So there are trade-offs. On one hand, you get an entire floor for yourself: rest, study, do group work, enjoy coffee in the kitchen, party and put posters of your choice on the walls of the student space. One of the biggest pros of this is the general feeling of the distinctive welcoming community, where you (very probably will) belong.
This is one part of a longer guide to LUMES at LUCSUS, written by a current student for prospective and incoming students. It's meant to be read on its own or alongside the rest: LUMES Requiem?
See the full guide and other sections here →
The same thing was reported by the 2021 external review. The evaluators singled out the "Third Floor" as much more than rooms: a space for community-building and out-of-class life, with staff offices close by and an approachable culture they called exemplary. But notice what the review was evaluating: the space as a learning environment. What it never asked (because it wasn't the question in front of it?) is what that same enclosure does to the range of ideas you're exposed to. The review saw the walls and saw a home. I look at them and see an (echo) chamber. Same building, different question.
Here you cannot meet a macroeconomy student in the corridor and start a discussion on the effects of neoliberal policies in Argentina, or you are not likely to see an ad for a seminar on AI sustainability run by engineering faculty. Systemically speaking, the default option now is to spend a great part of your time with students of the same ontology. Enriching your environment with ideas and engaging in broader discussions is a deliberate choice you'll have to make.
As you will see later, there is a pattern: status quo will have a centrifugal force, gravitating you to LUCSUS.
Study-wise, your first year consists of seven courses, running one after another, with one course in the second semester running in parallel for half a year. Your average course will be run by one or two main lecturers and two to four guest speakers (usually for one specific topic). At the same time, they will largely repeat: the main prof for one course will come as a guest for the other two courses, etc. In the end, for the first year, you'll encounter ~12 lecturers and ~5 PhD students. Importantly, the vast majority (~90%) will be employees of LUCSUS or alumni of LUMES (and so will belong to the critical sustainability science school of thought). Those who are not will come two to three times over the whole year and usually only for one-time lectures.
There are genuine advantages to this. You have time to build real relationships with the people teaching you, to develop a reputation (which I highly recommend you do), and to be known as something more than a name on a list. So there are rather good chances that you can get personalised advice and detailed feedback on your performance in the assignment evaluation. And the dominance of one school of thought will allow you to easily build an internally coherent worldview.
But the intellectual cost might be significant: the range of core theories, assumptions, and disciplinary traditions you are exposed to is narrow (by design). I want to pre-empt an objection here, because the 2021 review mentions something interesting. The evaluators praised the teaching staff's breadth of scholarly backgrounds and celebrated the cohort's roughly 25 nationalities as a genuine strength, and they're right on both counts. But notice these are two different axes. Disciplinary breadth (geographers, political scientists, economists in the room) and national diversity (students from 20+ countries) are real and abundant. What's narrow is the third axis: the school of thought. You can assemble a disciplinarily diverse, gloriously international faculty who nonetheless all share the commitments of critical sustainability science, and that's exactly what LUMES has.
Diversity of passports and diplomas is not diversity of foundational assumptions, but it shapes what you'll actually be taught to think. Nobody who comes to teach will hold, say, neoliberal values, and so won't be able to honestly represent opposing positions in the broader sustainability debate. This is not a small point; I believe it's the structural root of a bigger problem I take apart in Epistemic culture: a critical discipline that has nobody in the room to critique it. This risks two outcomes. First, (sometimes too often) representation of some positions in the academic debate is (over)simplified. And second, consequently, presented ideas (held by the lecturer) might therefore seem more complex and coherent. And so if you want to build a more holistic worldview, you'll have to do so yourself. The status quo pulls you inward. Broadening your intellectual environment requires swimming against the current, and this might be challenging.
The closed system reproduces itself at the peer level, too. Your classmates will largely share the same intellectual orientation as your teachers; not because LUMES selects for it explicitly, but because the programme attracts a self-selecting group and then immerses them in a single school of thought. In practice, this means that the ideas treated as settled by your lecturers will also tend to be treated as settled in group work, seminars, and corridor conversations.
I noticed (though I won't prove this in court) that students were reluctant to voice challenges to the dominant frameworks, partly for social reasons and partly, perhaps, out of uncertainty about how such challenges would land academically.
That centrifugal pull I promised you at the top is now visible: the physical enclosure and the intellectual enclosure reinforce each other, and both point inward, toward LUCSUS. You'll meet this same gravity in every section that follows: in how criticism is applied (Epistemic culture), in which disciplines get the centre of gravity (Natural, Social, Humanistic), and even in why the programme struggles to keep pace with its own field (Emerging Sustainability and Transcending Paradigms). It's one force wearing different clothes.
One final note: the physical setup described here reflects LUMES as it exists now.
Brief historical note:
LUCSUS, before 2019, was a separate research centre and from 2019 on is in a continuous process of deeper integration into the Faculty of Social Sciences. In the end, it will be merged with the Department of Human Geography (KEG), which may eventually mean sharing the building with students from other programmes. If that happens, the dynamic of physical separateness (and some of what it produces) may look different for cohorts arriving in a few years.
An addition to that: currently (what I observed as student rep in the board meetings and what a few of my friends felt as well), LUCSUS staff is deeply invested in how the merger will continue. Even though it has no direct impact on the program structure, it shapes the work atmosphere for staff and (from my perspective) might negatively impact some of the studying experience.
More generally, the detailed mechanism of the merger and the operational scheme for the combined institution have not been decided (or is not known to me) yet. Behind this, there are potential threats and opportunities.
The general vibe around the merger is rather sceptical among staff. (This staff preoccupation matters beyond atmosphere — it feeds directly into why the institution is slow to change, which I return to in Horizons of Sustainability.)
Regardless, what you might expect if you get accepted in a few following years is a bit of structural perturbations, which might affect your studies but might not.
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