Sustainability Slam & Sustainability Night Tübingen

The next Sustainability Slam will be announced on this website. We're already looking forward to having you join us—whether as a slammer or an audience member!

About the sustainability night

The "Sustainability Night" is organized annually by the Environmental Center Tübingen and takes place in spring in the old town of Tübingen at various locations. The Sustainability Night is all about how to realize a more sustainable life in Tübingen. Numerous actors from the city and the wider region present information booths and host a range of activities designed to inspire visitors to take action. They highlight opportunities for engagement and use creative approaches to demonstrate how individuals can actively contribute to sustainability. The Sustainability Night is not only intended to provide information, but above all to be fun. The Sustainability Slam fits in perfectly with this:

Clicking on the image leads to an external link to a short video report about the Night of Sustainability 2023. A contribution by Angela Salm, Harshita Dayal, Melina Raptis, Noemi Spano, and Yinan Duan from the University of Tübingen, in cooperation with SWR Tübingen.

About the Sustainability Slam

The Competence Center for Sustainable Development (CCSD) is very grateful to participate in the Night of Sustainability. It has been doing so for several years with the now established format of the Sustainability Slam. The Sustainability Slam combines the best of poetry slam and science slam under the theme of sustainability. With their creative, funny or thoughtful contributions, the slammers share their thoughts, feelings, ideas or knowledge on the topic of sustainability. The audience can look forward to diverse insights into commitment, experiences or even research around sustainability. The rules are not as strict as in a "real" poetry slam, for example, aids (projector, visual aids, ...) are allowed. Since each performance is unique and of outstanding quality, all participants in the Sustainability Slam receive a small prize. This way, the audience is spared the difficult task of choosing a single “best” contribution.

Sustainability Slam reports

6th Sustainability Slam 2025 at the CIVIS Pop-Up-Store ECKSTEIN Tübingen

Poetry slams and sustainability – a combination that never fails to inspire. This was once again demonstrated by the Competence Center for Sustainable Development (KNE) at the University of Tübingen: On July 4, 2025, the 6th Sustainability Slam took place at the CIVIS Pop-Up-Store ECKSTEIN. Under this year’s theme, “Sustainable Development”, the slam participants shared creative insights into their engagement, experiences, and research related to sustainability topics.

This year, Marcel Vondermaßen, coordinator of the Ethics Center (IZEW), Nina Oerter, sustainability and institutional development officer at IWM, and Kerstin Schopp, coordinator of KNE, performed one after the other.

As usual, the KNE team introduced themselves to the audience. Additionally, the slam participants were asked to share three personal facts about themselves – two true and one false. Before each performance, the audience tried to guess which fact was false, creating many laughs and exciting moments.

At the end, all three slam participants received a great prize – and, above all, lots of applause for their creative contributions.

The 6th Sustainability Slam was once again a thoroughly successful evening: inspiring, entertaining, and full of engagement. The event was masterfully hosted by Arno Schmidt, who guided the program with charm and humor. A heartfelt thank you goes to the ECKSTEIN team for their fantastic support – and of course to the slam participants, whose creativity and passion made the evening possible.

→ Watch a video recap of the Sustainability Slam 2025 here:
https://www.instagram.com/p/DNoJ3W8N9zv/

Enjoy watching and see you at the next slam!

5th Sustainability Slam 2023 – @d.a.i.

[Translate to Englisch:] Bild der vier Slammerinnen, der Moderatorin und des Gastgebers vom d.a.i.

Beautiful words are not enough to save the world? We have tried it once again together...

Poetry slams and sustainability go wonderfully hand in hand. The Competence Center for Sustainable Development at the University of Tübingen was able to prove this once again: On 12.10.23 the fifth Sustainability Slam took place. On invitation and in cooperation with the German-American Institute Tübingen (d.a.i.), this time the slam took place in the premises of the d.a.i. in Karlstraße - surrounded by the exhibition "The Culture of Food & Waste". Almost 50 guests filled the hall and enjoyed four creative contributions:

The first contribution was dedicated to the topic of paper. The slammer herself is a member of Papierpilz, a Tübingen initiative that collects misprints at the university and uses them to make colorful and practical notepads. In a cheerful way, she brought the audience closer to how our history, but also today's society, is supported by paper in many ways. The second contribution was a very thoughtful and emotional one, in which the slammer asked herself how it can be that mankind is so bad with its basis of life, the planet Earth. This was followed by a contribution that went more in the direction of a science slam - namely, one that introduced the audience to a very concrete new sustainability idea. The slammer reported on plant charcoal fertilizer made from organic waste and even had some fertilizer pellets to touch. And finally, the last contribution came from a slammer who shared her personal thoughts and impressions on the concept and meaning of sustainability with the audience in an impressive text.

In addition to the contributions themselves, d.a.i. and KNE introduced themselves to the audience. In addition, as in previous slams, the slammers were asked in advance for three facts about themselves - two of them true and one untruth. Before each contribution, the audience was asked to guess the untrue fact. At the end, the slammers all received a small prize and, above all, a lot of applause.

All in all, the 5th Sustainability Slam was again a very nice and successful event. The evening was brilliantly moderated by Jeanine, who is now unfortunately leaving our KNE team: Many, many thanks to you! We would also like to thank the d.a.i. for the invitation, the excellent cooperation and organization and would be very happy about a repetition! Above all, we would like to thank the slammers who made this beautiful and inspiring slam evening possible with their creative contributions.

4th Sustainability Slam at the Sustainability Night 2023

On May 12, 2023, the Tübingen Night of Sustainability took place, organized by the Environmental Center Tübingen. For the fourth time, the Competence Center for Sustainable Development of the University of Tübingen participated with a Sustainability Slam - a mixture of poetry slam and science slam around the topic of sustainability.

The Sustainability Slam is already an integral part of the Night of Sustainability. This was not only evident from the large number of spectators who crowded into the auditorium of the public library. One of the five slammers also performed for the second time. Marius Albiez from the Karlsruhe Transformation Center for Sustainability and Cultural Change slammed about the advantages of solar cells as a sustainability booster on the balcony. Jana Krämer from the Last Generation touched the audience with her contribution If you ask others and if you ask me with different social perspectives on activism. Eva Schweibert talks about The Extent of Destruction in a fictional conversation with God. Simone Wagner questions the role and future of the car in her contribution Four Wheels for a Hallelujah. Finally, Jan Haugg recites his Letter to the Dear Cow and talks about the relationship between humans and animals.

Overall, all slammers reflected on current social debates about sustainability and encouraged the audience to think and act. Evaluations, as is usually the case with poetry slams, would only limit these opportunities for reflection. Therefore, the KNE decided to honor all participants and their contributions equally with a voucher from the Quichotte Literary Bookstore. One hour, thunderous applause and many new suggestions later, the audience moved on through the Night of Sustainability. After all the positive feedback, we are already looking forward to participating in the next Sustainability Night with the fifth edition of the Sustainability Slam.

[Translate to Englisch:] Bild der SlammerInnen bei der Nacht der Nachhaltigkeit in Tübingen 2023

2nd Sustainability Slam as part of the Action Days Sustainability Baden-Württemberg 2018

As part of the German Action Days on Sustainability and the Action Days on Sustainability Baden-Württemberg, the Sustainability Slam 2.0 took place on Friday, June 8, 2018 at Café Haag in Tübingen.

The four slammers Jessica Starke, Laura Schelenz, Arhea Marshall and Katharina Klang, and the warm-up slammer Marius, told us in their own personal way what connects their research, their reflections and their everyday life with sustainable development. They explained chain reactions with lemmings throwing themselves off the cliff, spoiled the audience with chocolate, introduced us to the Sustainability Iceberg and also the structure of sea urchin spines. Whether poetic or musical, with Power Point or self-painted signs, funny or thoughtful - everything was offered: from the question of quantify yourself vs. qualify yourself with the help of apps to influencing the pore size in technical ceramics with the help of pudding (gelatin) about the waste of raw materials, such as sand and salt, forgotten aspects in the sustainability discourse, to which we should definitely devote more attention, and, how festivals could be made more sustainable. There was a lot of bidding, a lot of clapping and a lot of laughing, and of course it goes without saying that all slammers left Café Haag as winners. In addition to an entertaining evening, the audience also got the following appeal from our slammer Jessica, which we would like to endorse: Please feel responsible!

A big thank you to the motivated slammers and the great audience! We are already looking forward to the next Sustainability Slam!