Dread, hope and the politics of emotion in engineering education

A socio-ecological polycrisis threatens life on Earth. Learning about the current state of the world can invoke dread, understood as fear of severe futures, and hope that such futures can be avoided. This study asks how dread and hope manifest in sustainability education in engineering, and how educators and students navigate these emotions. Drawing on a theoretical framework that conceptualises emotions as socio-political, we examine educators’ experiences. The empirical material consists of diary and field notes from a sustainability course offered to media technology students at a technical university in 2021, alongside meta-emotion reflections from workshops in which we, as educators and education researchers, collectively reflect on our experiences in 2024. The study shows that dread can play a constructive role in learning, serving both as a means to grasp the current situation and as a catalyst for action in the face of dark futures.