- Convenors:
-
Priya Raghavan
(Institute of Development Studies)
Ruhil Iyer (Institute of Development Studies)
Samreen Mushtaq (Institute of Development Studies)
Tessa Lewin (Institute of Development Studies)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Experimental format
- Stream:
- Reimagining development: From global cooperation to local agency
Short Abstract
This panel explores the disavowal of difficult and inconvenient affect within Development, such as failure, loss, despair. Drawing on queer and psychoanalytic theory, it asks how attending to ‘bad feelings’ might open new ways of knowing, being, and resisting in both development theory and practice.
Description
Dominant approaches to Development - and the term itself- are inextricably tethered to frames of linear progress, optimism, and advancement. Yet global projects of development, and those engaged in them, are frequently haunted by feelings of frustration, failure and futility. This panel draws on queer approaches to ‘bad feelings’ (Ahmed, 2005; Berlant, 2011: Love, 2007) and a growing attentiveness to the psychic life of development (Kapoor, 2020), to explore the epistemic and political potential of attending to these disavowed and disallowed affects.
What might it mean to mourn the unfulfilled promises of rights-based frameworks, or to acknowledge the melancholia that haunts progressive development imaginaries? How do we reconcile the simultaneous urgency and inadequacy of theory and activism in the face of genocide? Through an interactive session inviting a range of artistic, academic and activist interventions, this panel will surface and examine both the forms and effects of these banished feelings. In doing so, we recognise the political implications of affective circuits, and consider the subjects and subjectivities, imaginaries and alternatives inaugurated/foreclosed by bad feelings in development.
By attending to the affective and psychic dimensions of development, the panel opens a space for reckoning—with loss, complicity, and the limits of the developmental imagination—while seeking possibilities for solidarity and resistance in the ruins of the development industrial complex.
Ahmed, S. 2005. The politics of bad feeling. Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association Journal, 1(1), 1-17.
Love, H. 2007. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Boston: Harvard University Press.
Accepted contributions
Contribution short abstract
This paper contends with the failure of the international community and rights-based frameworks in the face of the Sudanese genocide. It will problematise the optimistic, linear narrative of development and encourage the use of shame as a vehicle for acknowledgement and collective responsibility.
Contribution long abstract
Development has become a science within the purview of the global north. Like other western sciences, the field of development today is formulaic, leaving little room for the expression of difficult emotions. However, the ‘bad feelings’ which arise in response to the injustices and failed promises of development act as a signal that historical issues remain unresolved (Ahmed, 2005). In contrast, the pervasive sense of optimism which practitioners in the development sphere are encouraged to embody inhibits progress by denying recognition of mistakes and shortcomings, and permits the absolution of personal responsibility.
In this paper, we will argue that the acknowledgement of bad feelings needn’t result in resignation and hopelessness, but can act as a communally understood starting point from which collective responsibility and progress can spring.
“Bad feelings” allow us to recognise the failures of the media, global institutions, and our own personal responses to incidents of genocide, allowing us to analyse our own relationship to issues of race and responsibility.
In Sudan, the racial element to the public’s response, even in progressive circles, raises feelings of despair and hopelessness, begging the question of whether the global response would be different if the people who were dying weren’t black.
Contribution short abstract
Bad feelings are instrumentalised to shame people into using toilets, yet unacknowledged disillusionment and frustration pervade the wider affective life of WASH work. Attending to this contradiction allows failures to be reframed as generative spaces for learning, critique, and rethinking Progress.
Contribution long abstract
Water, sanitation, hygiene or WASH has been a prolific part of the Development machinery for almost four decades, both through research and projectized interventions. This paper examines where and how bad feelings are permissible and what this affords in terms of thinking and learning around failures and its imaginaries within the WASH sector.
Behavioural change programmes are a foundational corner stone of WASH a programmatic respons; wherein ‘bad feelings’ of shame and disgust are instrumentalised to stop people from openly defecating and practice ‘good behaviours’ through using toilets. This has been exported through various versions of Community Led Total Sanitation and other community led behaviour change programmes over the last two decades, using shame and disgust in projects and programmes and seemingly permissible because of the WASH sector’s inherently positivist commitment to expanding sanitation ‘coverage’. However, broader ‘bad feelings’ of disillusionment, frustration and critical reflection that centrally underscore and envelop the official record of our work, are left to dissipate in the margins of unfulfilled commitments and slipping sanitation coverage.
Recognising such contradictions provides an opening to ask deeper and richer questions around how pervasive bad feelings of disillusionment and frustration may be generative for a broader, more honest and representative conceptualisation of failures within WASH and development. Attending to these affective undercurrents within development work allows failure to be understood not as an endpoint to be corrected, but as a generative site of learning that challenges how knowledge is produced for Progress in WASH and development practice.
Contribution long abstract
Through this contribution, I reflect on my experiences of being involved in anti-caste work in Bengaluru, India, and Brighton, United Kingdom as a student belonging to an oppressor caste. I discuss the recurring bouts of jealousy I attend to, provoked by reasons such as witnessing my fellow oppressor caste peers enjoy deep family and social ties and their associated class benefits or grieving my lack of access to Ambedkarite communities. As these tensions are not—and perhaps, should not be—at the forefront of anti-caste discourse, I find myself dwelling on the loneliness of the choices I have made. Examining these feelings from a critical lens, I consider how they may stem from “hatred in the belly” (Ambedkar Age Collective, 2016) and, further, how “bad feelings” such as jealousy and loneliness can respond to the shared responsibility of radicality (Samos, 2025) in the contemporary landscape.