Complaint!

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I painted a lot of macabre, expressionist paintings, and I got into art school, but my father said it wouldn’t lead to a proper career, so I wasn’t allowed to go. I don’t think it was a conscious decision, but once it happened, I became more interested in writing itself and in what I was doing with it. The file is put away in a cabinet, and the cabinet is in a room, and the door to the room is locked, and that’s that. Great for those experiencing bullying, harassment, discrimination and abuse of power as well as for those who want to be upstanders and allies for the victims of these abuses of power.

I read it after reading Laura Kipnis' Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus where complaints on campus have had serious consequences for some predatory professors. Though Ahmed’s own experience is not treated directly, her reflections on the subject reveal her personal stakes in prizing apart the complaint.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.

This book offers a systematic analysis of the methods used to stop complaints and a powerful and poetic meditation on what complaints can be used to do. It might be that you’re at an event surrounded by peers, and maybe you signed a confidentiality agreement, or the institution that’s hosting the event is the institution in which the thing happened—there’s a restriction on what you can say about what went on.

A must read for administrators and faculty interested in equitable and necessary change in any institution. but then I realize I don't actually want to share it with anyone who doesn't want to be changed by it. Being a Feminist Killjoy is a matter of identification; it is also, as Ahmed describes on the blog, what she does and how she thinks, “my philosophy and my politics. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. It kind of changed when I wrote Queer Phenomenology, which in a way is, of all my works, the most located in a philosophical tradition.

And whilst no doubt a difficult read for university leaders, they should read it to help them reflect on what is happening in their institutions and learn how they can truly implement those policies and practice to bring about fair and just equality of opportunity. 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. Through the extensive use of the door metaphor, Sarah Ahmed offers the language and understanding that is needed to tend to the wounds of exclusion and rejection.Sara Ahmed follows the institutional life of complaints within the university, exploring how they begin, how they are processed and how they are ultimately stopped, thereby reproducing systems of whiteness, violence and silencing.

Here, she asks readers to think about some inescapable questions: What happens when complaints are pushed under the rug? Throughout the book, Ahmed and their collaborators noted plenty of helpful strategies for managing the personal and collective toll that complaining can bring. Maybe it was partly because I was trying to read it casually while taking care of a newborn, or maybe because mid-way through the book I lost my Kindle at the beach, and so the only way I had to read this was through the Kindle app on my phone, which made those extra-long analytical paragraphs that proliferate in this book seem even longer. There’s a lot to learn from paying attention to people’s complaints, and just as much to learn from paying attention to whose complaints are not heard.Could say more about that, the communities or modes of communicating that opened themselves up to you once you made your exit? I was very conscious of how administrators in charge of diversity initiatives would try to maximize the distance between themselves and the complainers.