Conference spaces as emotional sites for becoming campus sustainability leaders

Abstract This paper applies a feminist political ecology approach to ask: How do sustainability in higher education (SHE) conference events co-produce the subjectivities and expertise of campus sustainability professionals (CSPs) emotionally? Specifically, how do SHE conference spaces cultivate particular embodied practices and discourses in CSPs who are meant to translate at times irreconcilable practices and discourses in their daily campus-based work? Through multi-event ethnography and autoethnography of SHE events and comparisons with academic conferences more broadly in my role as a teacher-scholar-activist, I analyze how CSPs encounter and challenge ‘green’ knowledge claims emotionally. Vignettes from a sample of conference spaces demonstrate that SHE events provoke a confusion of conflicting emotions, all while promoting products, services and solutions to ‘fix’ the distressing emotions they provoke. Furthermore, the emergence of informal and formal wellness discourses and performances at SHE conferences re-directs CSPs away from critical questions of power toward self-centered, technocratic and technophilic solutions. A politics of failure can challenge audit culture, the bullshitization of sustainability work and neoliberal tropes of professionalism and self-improvement. Such a politics compliments ongoing efforts to center justice-oriented work in sustainability.