- 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.