But the same market logic that dismisses a complaint when it compromises the image of an institution or requires institutional change is capable of brandishing a complaint when it wants an excuse, say, for closing a department already earmarked for the chop. In addition to the analysis of complaint as a method, Ahmed illuminates how institutions like the university are designed for precisely the people who can and continue to flourish while miming theoretical righteousness and perpetuating violent norms.

COMPLAINT - Duke University Press

The word window comes from a combination of wind and eye and has been compared to the old Frisian word andern, literally meaning ‘breath-door’, a window as a hole that allows the passage of air as well as light and sound. A complaint might be the start of something – so much happens after a complaint is lodged, because it has been lodged – but it is never the starting point’ (20). We brought what I thought of as a critical language into it, but the university was able to use the policy—which was about articulating racism in the institution—as evidence of how good it was at race equality. Her seminal work, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, in which she explores the social dimension and circulation of emotions, is recognized as a foundational text in the nascent field of affect theory. But it’s unlikely to do so in a way that is good news for women or feminists – or anyone else, for that matter, who has reason to complain.For example, in "The Promise of Happiness," she explores the way that happiness acts as "social pressure" to push individuals towards or away from certain experiences, objects, and behaviours. Hi Sara, I’ve been reading your books and blogs for a little over a year now and I just wanted to say thank you. This toxic brew of marketisation-plus-culture-war can be expected to exacerbate the pre-existing tendency, noticed only in passing by Ahmed, whereby those who teach in ways or on matters deemed ‘too political’ (gender and race, Palestine etc) are at risk of attracting complaint: ‘You are not only heard as complaining; you are likely to have complaints made about you. These interviews, not least because of the exhausting (and, in many cases, life-altering) nature of what was being complained about, become “testimonies”.

Complaint! by Sara Ahmed Can’t Complain | Eda Gunaydin on Complaint! by Sara Ahmed

Something similar can be said of criminal law: being critical of it doesn’t mean you can’t make use of it, for instance, to resist workplace discrimination. In another a lecturer who, enraged that his student girl friend wanted to end the relationship, knocked her to the ground and kicked her so badly that her bruises lasted for six weeks. The complaints compiled in the book range from institutional violence (the focus of Part Three, ‘If These Doors Could Talk? If a story can be inherited as distance (“no one goes near her”), a complaint gives you proximity, an unwilled proximity, to those who have been cast out. per cent of men – had experienced an ‘attempted or completed sexual act obtained by force, violence or coercion’.Organisations often respond to criticism ‘by pointing to their own policies as if having a policy against something is evidence it does not exist’.

Complaint! by Sara Ahmed | LSE Review of Books Book Review: Complaint! by Sara Ahmed | LSE Review of Books

According to the publisher: "examines what we can learn about power from those who complain about abuses of power. A complaint becomes a magnifying glass: so many details are picked up by an attention; the geography of a place, the building, the long corridors, the locked doors, the windows with blinds that come down, less light, less room. Perhaps we can think of complaint as trying to change how people reside somewhere, which requires an act of dwelling on the problems with or in that residence. Toward the end of her story, she told me about another student who had made a complaint before her: “There was a woman who had filed a complaint and she was outcast; no one goes near her.The real nuance and sophistication of this book, written with such emotional and intellectual insight, the means by which Ahmed identifies strategies of institutional power in relation to power in relation to harassment and abuse is revelatory, thorny, painful, and very, very necessary. To Ahmed, diversity work is "[learning] about the techniques of power in the effort to transform institutional norms or in an effort to be in a world that does not accommodate our being. Your sentences can feel like a closed loop, in which the same phrases keep iterating—but then they shift such that a new possibility is illuminated. This is another insightful book in Ahmed’s well-regarded series of considerations of what acting as a feminist in non-feminist institutions means.

Silence will not protect us. Program — Silence will not protect us.

Ahmed’s linguistic adventures take up a lot of space, with the result that, despite the subject matter, the book feels less than urgent. But its insights are less often applied to what might be considered ‘quasi-carceral’ systems: disciplinary procedures that have some power to compel and to penalise but which stand outside criminal law. She often analyzes structures of emotion as social phenomena that dictate the way we lead our lives. Windows, like doors, are passages; they can be opened and closed, although windows are not usually intended for the passage of persons.I was somewhere else, in my little cottage in the middle of Cambridgeshire, and being out meant all the stories could come out with me. That the press picked up on her departure opened up a way for people to share their stories with her, and so the book’s trajectory changed to what it is now. from her own experiences (she resigned from an institution after they mishandled a series of complaints), her engagement with a “complaint collective” in the UK, and her decades-long scholarship in feminist, queer, and race studies. Common sense tells us that these institutions will handle complaints as institutions generally do: with foot-dragging, arse-covering and punitive treatment of whistleblowers.