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It argues that higher-education scholarship often links “strong” emotions to political agency while treating weak emotions such as depression, numbness, and anxiety as liabilities. Drawing on queer and feminist debates on affect, the work challenges affective-political norms and avoids pathologizing negative feeling. It uses academic depression to show how bad feelings can open routes of repair and transformation within the contemporary university.",{"@graph":69,"@context":122},[70,84,105],{"@type":71,"itemListElement":72},"BreadcrumbList",[73,77,79,82],{"item":74,"name":75,"@type":76,"position":8},"https://docshare.wps.com","Home","ListItem",{"item":78,"name":9,"@type":76,"position":14},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/",{"item":80,"name":40,"@type":76,"position":81},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/research-report/",3,{"item":83,"name":65,"@type":76,"position":19},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/what-might-bad-feelings-be-good-for-some-queer-feminist-thoughts-on-academic-activism/594691/",{"url":83,"name":65,"@type":85,"image":86,"author":91,"headline":65,"publisher":94,"fileFormat":97,"inLanguage":63,"description":67,"dateModified":98,"datePublished":99,"encodingFormat":97,"isAccessibleForFree":100,"interactionStatistic":101},"DigitalDocument",{"url":87,"@type":88,"width":89,"height":90},"https://docshare.wps.com/thumbnails/what-might-bad-feelings-be-good-for-some-queer-feminist-thoughts-on-academic-activism/594691.png","ImageObject",300,407,{"name":92,"@type":93},"Ben ","Person",{"url":74,"name":95,"@type":96},"DocShare","Organization","application/pdf","2026-10-23","2026-10-15",true,{"@type":102,"interactionType":103,"userInteractionCount":19},"InteractionCounter",{"@type":104},"ViewAction",{"@type":106,"mainEntity":107},"FAQPage",[108,114,118],{"name":109,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":111},"Why does the article focus on “bad feelings” in academic activism?","Question",{"text":112,"@type":113},"It asks why negative emotions may matter for activism and argues that they can do more than signal political failure; they may support transformation and repair within university life.","Answer",{"name":115,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":116},"How does higher-education scholarship typically treat emotions in political terms?",{"text":117,"@type":113},"It often codes positive, strong feelings (like hope and anger) as politically useful resources, while framing weak feelings (like depression and anxiety) as political liabilities.",{"name":119,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":120},"What theoretical approach does the article use to challenge common assumptions?",{"text":121,"@type":113},"It draws on queer and feminist literature on affect to defamiliarise everyday understandings of what “bad feelings” can and cannot do, using Cvetkovich’s study of academic depression as a key example.","https://schema.org",{"og:url":83,"og:type":124,"og:title":65,"og:site_name":95,"og:description":67},"article",{"robots":126,"canonical":83},"index,follow",{"doc_id":128,"site_id":62},594691,1792171100,{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":131},{"doc_id":128,"user_id":132,"nickname":92,"user_avatar":133,"doc_module":4,"category_id":39,"category_name":40,"doc_title":65,"doc_description":67,"doc_content":134,"file_id":135,"file_url":136,"file_type":137,"file_size":138,"view_count":19,"is_deleted":4,"is_public":8,"is_downloadable":8,"audit_status":8,"page_count":44,"language":139,"language_code":63,"site_id":62,"html_lang":63,"table_of_contents":140,"faqs":141,"seo_title":142,"seo_description":67,"update_tm":143,"read_time":144},2336478951081,"https://ap-avatar.wpscdn.com/davatar_276721f389ce27ea32af1340a28f341c","A U S T R A L I A N U N I V E R S I T I E S ’ R E V I E W  \nWhat might‘bad feelings’ be good for?  \nSome queer-feminist thoughts on academic activism  \nJames Burford  \nThammasat University, Thailand  \nThe purpose of this article is to explore how we might understand ‘bad feelings’ and their place in academic activism. The article begins with a proposition that higher education scholarship reproduces certain habits of thinking about affective practices and their political utility. Often ‘strong’ feelings such as hope, anger, and frustration are associated with political agency, whereas ‘weak’ feelings such as depression, numbness and anxiety tend to be written off as political liabilities. This article draws upon queer and feminist debateson affect in order to disrupt these habits of thought. Rather than rushing to pathologise ‘bad feelings’ as politically useless, this article lingers with them, in order that they might teach us something about the complexity of political practice in the contemporary university. By interrogating affective-political norms, this article hopes to expand the pool of affective resources that may be available for academic activism in the present.  \nKeywords: activism, affective-politics, depression, queer theory, feminist theory  \nIt’s a search for utopia that doesn’t make a simple distinction between good and bad feelings or assume that good politics can only emerge from good feelings; feeling bad might, in fact, be the ground for transformation. (Ann Cvetkovich, 2012, p. 3)  \nIntroduction  \nThis article draws two threads of argument together, one emerging from higher education scholarship on affective-politics and another surfacing from queer and feminist theorisations of negative feeling. I begin the article by considering the ways in which higher education scholarship has tended to code the political utility of emotions. I track two tendencies in existing research:  \n1) negative feeling is often used to diagnose political problems, and 2) feelings that are interpreted as positive and strong, such as hope and optimism, are often seen as resources with political potential, whereas weak or ‘bad’feelings, such as depression, numbness and anxiety, are 70 What might ‘bad feelings’be good for? James Burford  \noften written off as political liabilities.The second thread of the article is theoretical: drawing on a wide body of queer and feminist literature on affect I make the case for higher education researchers to defamiliarise ourselves from common sense understandings of what‘bad feelings’can and cannot do. Drawing in detail on Cvetkovich’s (2012) study of academic depression, I demonstrate not only the limits of some taken-for-granted affective-political narratives, but also show how bad feelings may open up possible routes of repair and transformation.  \nFeeling neoliberalism: Affect as a diagnostic tool  \nThis article is animated by a question: why might ‘bad feelings’ be important when it comes to academic activism? Perhaps the most common way to answer this question is to say that bad feelings matter because they offer critical feedback about what may be occurring in  \nvol. 59, no. 2, 2017  \nA U S T R A L I A N U N I V E R S I T I E S ’ R E V I E W  \nthe political sphere. Observing patterns of emotional suffering across different time periods and among differently positioned constituencies might be used to teach activists things about the impacts of reforms. By this understanding affect is diagnostic, and tracing its distribution can help us to narrate a political scenario. Such a framing moves in the direction of what Margaret Wetherell (2012) calls ‘affective practice’, which allows for the tracking of clusters of feeling ‘across a scene, a site or an institution’(2012, p. 14) . Following this logic, we can look to the emotional sphere to examine the kinds of affective subjects that tend to be constituted within particular spaces, places and times.  \nSuch a way of working with affect has beco","cbCaiodquXxOuf3S","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaiodquXxOuf3S","pdf",115278,"English","# Introduction\n# Feeling neoliberalism: Affect as a diagnostic tool","[{\"question\":\"Why does the article focus on “bad feelings” in academic activism?\",\"answer\":\"It asks why negative emotions may matter for activism and argues that they can do more than signal political failure; they may support transformation and repair within university life.\"},{\"question\":\"How does higher-education scholarship typically treat emotions in political terms?\",\"answer\":\"It often codes positive, strong feelings (like hope and anger) as politically useful resources, while framing weak feelings (like depression and anxiety) as political liabilities.\"},{\"question\":\"What theoretical approach does the article use to challenge common assumptions?\",\"answer\":\"It draws on queer and feminist literature on affect to defamiliarise everyday understandings of what “bad feelings” can and cannot do, using Cvetkovich’s study of academic depression as a key example.\"}]","What might 'bad feelings' be good for? - Some queer-feminist thoughts on academic activism | PDF",1792079649,23]