Complaint! offers catharsis, collectivity, and care. It is an archive of complaint, it is a radical call to action, and it is a feminist record. It is also beautifully written, deeply painful, and absolutely necessary at this very moment.” The more complaints are contained, the more we need to express them, to get them out, keep them alive; the more we need to sneak, to leak, to leave trails behind us so that others can find us. After all, as we have learnt, a complaint in the present can lead to an unburial of past complaints. I think of the complaint graveyard. I shared this image with one person that had been shared with me by another: Ahmed] presents a strong argument that power in higher education tends to protect itself, that diversity initiatives are often nothing more than window dressing, and that those who file complaints about a hostile work environment often face accusations of disloyalty or troublemaking. . . . Most of the charges here are broad and general, but anyone who has worked in higher education will recognize much of what Ahmed brings to light. Sharp criticism of an overlooked systemic problem in higher education." It is a mess, a tangle, if you get in, you can’t work out how to get out; you end up with so many dead ends, so many crossed wires. And despite all of that, all that work, nothing seems to shift.

Complaint!, by Sara Ahmed | Times Higher Education (THE)

You can be kept out by what you find out when you get in. And yet consider how diversity is often figured as an open door, turned into a tagline; tag on, tag along; minorities welcome, come in, come in! Just because they welcome you, it does not mean they expect you to turn up. Remember the post-box that became a nest? There could be another sign on the post-box: “birds welcome.” A complaint can be the effort to be accommodated. An academic describes how she has to keep pointing out that rooms are inaccessible because they keep booking rooms that are inaccessible: “I worry about drawing attention to myself. But this is what happens when you hire a person in a wheelchair. There have been major access issues at the university.” She spoke of “the drain, the exhaustion, the sense of why should I have to be the one who speaks out.” You have to speak out because others do not; and because you speak out others can justify their own silence; they hear you, so it becomes about you, “major access issues” become your issues. Ahmed – whose work embraces feminist, queer and race studies – has since embarked on a new research project, outside institutional academia, that was sparked by the bruising experience of trying to improve the university’s complaints process. Her new study, drawing on oral and written testimony from dozens of complainants, has much to teach us about the structures and mechanisms of institutional power. It’s a timely topic during this moment of reinvigorated feminism and reports of systemic harassment on Australian university campuses.

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Emma Rees is professor of literature and gender studies at the University of Chester, where she is director of the Institute of Gender Studies.

Sara Ahmed Complaint! Durham: Duke University Press, 2021

When you throw your body into the system to try to stop it from working, you feel the impact of how things are working” (171)

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The book will appeal to socio-legal scholars interested in the phenomenology of organizations and institutions, especially academia. . . . Though Ahmed’s own experience is not treated directly, her reflections on the subject reveal her personal stakes in prizing apart the complaint. According to her unique positionality, she is both a witness and party to the community of people who supply the knowledge and encouragement complainers rely on to see their complaint through. In Ahmed’s decision to treat the testimonies about complaints on their terms, she weaves an intrinsic activist sensibility through the book." — Monika Lemke, Canadian Journal of Law and Society Ahmed, Sara (3 February 2017). "Out and About". Feminist Killjoys. wordpress.org . Retrieved 16 March 2017. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep content for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services