Embodied learning and climate emotions in higher education: sensory environmental education in an Iranian Global South context

This study examines how embodied, sensory-based environmental learning is experienced and interpreted in relation to climate emotions among university students in Iran, a Global South higher education context. Drawing on phenomenological interviews with 74 students across six ecologically diverse educational settings, it explores how multisensory environmental encounters connect with emotion, reflection, environmental identity, and perceived agency. Degraded landscapes were associated with grief and distress, resilient ecosystems with hope and belonging, and hybrid or technocratic ‘green’ spaces with ambivalent emotional and epistemic responses. Disciplinary backgrounds and educational experiences shaped how students interpreted these encounters and connected to environmental responsibility and self-understanding. Rather than demonstrating direct transformative or behavioural effects, the findings show how embodied encounters can become sites of situated affective-ecological meaning-making. The study contributes to higher education research by positioning embodiment, emotion, and situated environmental experience as interconnected dimensions of critical and contextually responsive sustainability learning.