Sitting with wickedness: negative capability and the practice of despair in and beyond university

Abstract

Higher education often treats negative emotions as problems to be managed or removed. This paper argues that a wicked problems approach to teaching evokes a distinct emotion, which I term despair, and develops an alternative framework for understanding it. Despair, I argue, is the affective response to a cognition-agency gap that emerges when individuals recognise the complexity of a wicked problem and the inability of available approaches to resolve it. This felt distance can evoke two responses: nihilism or naive hope – to ignore the problem, or to run after solutions regardless of fit. Instead, this paper argues for a middle-ground approach: sitting with despair, recognising that one's response is due not to one's own limitations but to the inherent nature of the wicked problems themselves. It outlines a variety of ways to sit with despair in the classroom, allowing students to build a negative capability that better tolerates uncertainty.