When the room is left to hold the tension: orientations towards learning to fail and ‘fail better’ when ‘doing emotions’ in engineering education

This collective autoethnography emerged from our experiences at the Emotions in Engineering Education Symposium 2025. Multiple moments of tension, discomfort, and rupture generated a sense of failing the community, prompting reflections on emotions as sites of meaning and struggle in international scholarly communities. Rooted in and building on African communitarian philosophy, particularly Ubuntu, as well as decolonial, queer and Western feminist theory, we conceptualize emotions as made in community and entangled with power, (in)justices, and (un)even distributions of (dis)comforts and labours. In a meta-affective reflexive thematic analysis of our collective ethnographic practice, we constellate four themes as starting and continuation points for collective reflections on our abilities to build emotionally responsive communities. We wonder: How can we design and inhabit scholarly spaces that centre emotions while collectively developing the response-abilities needed to hold discomfort, interrupt harm, transgress systemic oppression, share emotional labour, and learn to fail, and fail better, together.