Introducing a conscious approach into academic practice: Breaking boundaries in the conference space

This paper aims to explore the emotional geographies involved in introducing a conscious approach into academia. A conscious perspective embodies the notion of reflexive practices to encompass a state of awareness embracing all senses, emotions, feelings and experiences. We argue that adopting a conscious approach can facilitate change and challenge hierarchies and boundaries, to embed compassionate approaches into practice to contest the impacts of the neoliberalising of academia identified in the emotional geographies literature. To illustrate these points we present an analysis of producing a ‘conscious conference’. Conferences are a key site of academic practice in which hierarchies, boundaries and barriers are reproduced. To challenge this, we co-produced an event from a conscious perspective focusing on emotions in academia. This conscious approach demanded attention to the ‘atmosphere’ of the conference which we sought to disrupt and reformulate by deploying three ‘gentle disrupters’. How these were implemented, and the effects that they had, are discussed in three sections: Creating a new multi-sensorial space and atmosphere to challenge boundaries; Communication, Community and Co-Creation; and Emotion. The concluding section explores broader issues regarding introducing consciousness into academia and the central role that emotional geographies play within this approach.