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This article offers an in-depth exploration of university communications practice by describing and analysing a publicity and recruitment campaign, called ‘Challenge Everything’, carried out by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in 2018. By providing insight into internal sense-making around the campaign it contributes to literatures in science communication and communication management.

This qualitative research uses semi-structured interviews and informal organisational ethnography, mobilising concepts of sense-making and auto-communication to guide analysis. The focus is on how organisation members made sense of the Challenge Everything campaign.

The analysis focuses on four key themes within organisational sense-making about the campaign: the openness of the campaign meant that it was readily picked up on and personalised by university staff; its meaning was always contextual, shaped by organisation members' roles, interests, and concerns; its controversy seems to primarily derive from questions of representation, and specifically whether organisation members recognised within it their own experiences of university culture; and its development points to the rise of new forms of expertise within university organisation, and the contestation of these.

The research offers only a partial snapshot of one instance of university communications. However, in demonstrating how public campaigns also operate as auto-communication it has important implications for strategic communication within complex organisations such as universities.

The research has particular value in offering an in-depth qualitative study of university marketing practices and the effects these have within an organisation.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on approaches that acknowledge and make explicit the role of emotion in the entrepreneurship education classroom. As entrepreneurship educators, the authors are aware of the affective impacts that entrepreneurship education has on the students and the authors continuously reflect on and support the students through, what is acknowledged in practice, an emotionally charged experience. With this in mind, the authors outline how a variety of disciplines engage with the role of emotions and how an interdisciplinary approach to the topic can support pedagogy.

The authors synthesise relevant arguments from four discrete disciplines: neuroscience; psychology, education and entrepreneurship, which have not previously been combined. The authors argue that the role of emotion in learning generally, has been investigated across these disparate disciplines, but has not been brought together in a way that provides practical implications for the development of pedagogy.

By synthesising the findings from four bodies of knowledge that engage with emotion, entrepreneurship and education, the authors start to develop a theoretical model based around the concept of the emotional ecology of the classroom.

The role of emotion in entrepreneurship education is an emerging topic and the authors’ synthesis of research supports further investigation. The authors’ insights will support educators to develop classroom environments that acknowledge relationships between students and between students and educators. Such engagement could help educators and students to appreciate, acknowledge and address the emotional aspects of entrepreneurship education.

The paper starts to develop new theory around emotions in entrepreneurship education, developing the idea of the emotional “ecology” of teaching environments and highlighting how this might support future research agendas.