Rethinking Technology-Driven Sustainability Education Through Intermediality: Cultural Mediation, Literary and Artistic Humanities, and the Sustainable Development Goals

The implementation of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) across educational contexts has generated substantial research on pedagogies aligned with technology-driven sustainability education. Recent scholarship increasingly recognises that sustainability transitions require not only technological innovation but also cultural transformations capable of reshaping social norms, environmental imaginaries, and collective values. However, the processes through which sustainability meanings are mediated across different cultural and media environments remain insufficiently explored. This article argues that intermediality provides a valuable analytical framework for understanding how sustainability knowledge is produced, transformed, and experienced through interactions among literary, visual, performative, audiovisual, and digital media. To examine the visibility of such approaches within sustainability education research, the study employs a bibliometric and thematic mapping of the Web of Science Core Collection, focusing on humanities and cognate social science perspectives. The findings reveal that sustainability education scholarship remains predominantly concentrated within scientific, technological, and policy-oriented domains, while intermedial approaches remain comparatively marginal within the indexed journal literature. However, complementary analysis of humanities scholarship beyond conventional bibliometric databases indicates a more substantial body of theoretical and creative engagement with sustainability, suggesting a mismatch between indexing structures and humanities modes of knowledge production. The study proposes that integrating intermedial literacy into sustainability education can expand existing approaches to environmental literacy by addressing how ecological meanings are culturally mediated across technologies, narratives, artistic practices, and material environments. By connecting bibliometric evidence with intermedial and new materialist perspectives, the article contributes to ongoing debates on how technology-driven sustainability education can move beyond instrumental models of digital innovation towards more culturally informed, relational, and transformative pedagogies for implementing the SDGs.