The melancholic engineer: emotional intelligibility and the costs of persistence in engineering education

Engineering education increasingly asks how participation can become more equitable and sustainable. Yet efforts to broaden participation often focus on access and persistence, paying less attention to what participation demands from those already committed to engineering. Drawing on a longitudinal, phenomenologically informed qualitative study across multiple engineering education contexts (2019–2025), this article examines how emotional experiences become intelligible in relation to discrimination, belonging, and exclusion. The findings show that feelings can shape orientations, actions, and possibilities before participants can interpret them in relation to unequal conditions of participation. I develop emotional intelligibility to conceptualise this relation between the efficacy of emotional experience and its social interpretability, and critical reflexivity to describe how the conditions through which experiences become meaningful can themselves become questionable. Melancholic attachment, developed through Butler, explains why recognising exclusion need not dissolve disciplinary commitment. Persistence can therefore coexist with substantial emotional, social, and existential costs. The article argues that equitable and sustainable engineering education requires moving beyond retention towards conditions for dwelling in which unequal costs can become intelligible, contestable, and open to transformation.