Humanity is facing highly complex challenges at a global scale. A new sort of conscious sustainability changemakers is needed to face the sustainability challenge. However the mainstream entrepreneurship education tends to focus on business as usual skills, with a significant lack of comprehensive understanding of the whole system and the inner work needed to face the mental barriers to become sustainability changemakers. While the Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development was used as a structured approach to the topic, the research design was based on a dynamic research interactive model. Theory U guided the data gathering process that included participatory observation, dialogues with the organizers and participants through the seven progressive schools in Europe. The research aims to identify the common assumptions that guide the design of leading edge learning programs for sustainability changemakers. Building on the findings, the authors present a prototype of a learning tool in a form of self-reflection card game with the intention of helping the next generation of changemakers in their learning journey towards sustainability. Conclusions detail specific guidelines to design a learning program of changemakers towards sustainability.

Thesis advisor: Joshua E. Greene / We develop and implement obstructions to realizing a 3-manifold all of whose prime summands are lens spaces as Dehn surgery on a knot K in the Poincaré homology sphere, and in the process, we determine the knot Floer homology groups of a knot with such a surgery. We show that such a surgery never results in a 3-manifold with more than three non-trivial summands, and that if the result of surgery has exactly three non-trivial summands, then K is isotopic to a regular Seifert fiber. We furthermore identify the only two knots with half-integer lens space surgeries, and thus complete the classification of knots in the Poincaré homology sphere with non-integer lens space surgeries. We lastly show that a lens space L(p, q) that is realized as integer surgery on a knot K is realized as integer surgery on a Tange knot when p ≥ 2g(K). In order to do so, we build on Greene’s work on changemaker lattices and develop the theory of E8-changemaker lattices. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2023. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Mathematics.