Feeling good: The casual academic’s guide to purpose, pleasure and the meaning of work in precarious times

Abstract

Feeling good is about the emotional experience of writing as a casual academic in the current Australian context. In a non-linear, hybrid style that combines theory with personal narrative, the author grapples with questions about the meaning and conditions of scholarly work, particularly in the midst of a climate crisis, a global pandemic, and a university system increasingly pervaded by neoliberal ideals. She examines the obligations writers feel (and have) to be happy or unhappy in their work, and seeks guidance in the work of writers like Sara Ahmed, Donna Haraway and Harriet Hawkins as her own convictions about the university shift. What ensues is a contemplation on the politics and daily experience of feeling good (and bad) as a writer in the university, expressed through a series of reflections and scenes from life that enact a mode of thinking that is both taken with theory and available to interventions from the sensory, relational everyday world.