The Eco-Consumerist Paradox: A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis of Sustainability in an Elite Pakistani School

Abstract

Eco-sustainability has emerged as a new discourse in modernized education, especially in high-end private schools that position themselves as globally aware institutions. The study posits the eco-consumerist paradox in an exclusive Pakistani school that publicly welcomes the principle of sustainability while taking part in highly consumptive institutional practices. The study employs a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) analytical design, creating a trichotomy of semiotics: linguistic discourse in circulars and mission statements, visual-symbolic artifacts, and material practices. The synthesis of findings sheds light on a regular deviation between the rhetoric of the environment and environmental reality. In addition, sustainability is moralised linguistically as a student obligation, while institutional responsibility is swept away. Aesthetically, sustainability is aestheticized through green imagery and ecological virtue is displayed. The material further reveals consumerist practices that undermine the ecology of the school narrative. Subsequently, the study documents that in elite schooling settings, sustainability operates more as a symbolic capital, preserving the basic identity of classes and institutional prestige rather than as a structural change agent. Elite education sustainability without institutional responsibility is a rhetorical act, a figuratively green but substantively empty one.