Complaint!

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Throughout the book, Ahmed and their collaborators noted plenty of helpful strategies for managing the personal and collective toll that complaining can bring. I was very conscious of how administrators in charge of diversity initiatives would try to maximize the distance between themselves and the complainers. These insides will make my walk as a diversity, equity, inclusion and anti-racism professional much more effective. I became interested in “the table” in Husserl’s philosophy, which was only a passing reference for him.

In a similar vein, Ahmed choses not to give the interviewees aliases and instead briefly describes their circumstances (ex: a Black queer woman academic who made a complaint about racism and sexism in her department. 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. What, then, is the function of the university, these external committees and the role of a professor? I unflinchingly say the word ‘whiteness’ to discuss her arbitrary expectations and she then asks me to explain how I perceive the situation as racist or about whiteness. Is it possible to actually change an institution without stealing from it, disfiguring it, or vandalizing it?She often uses smart allegory like how figurative speech around doors or our fear of strangers pervades institutional logic. When bullying and harassment are institutionalized, it’s really hard to challenge them without challenging everything.

Being brought up in a middle-class environment, I was always told the university was where I would go. A must read for administrators and faculty interested in equitable and necessary change in any institution. As the author makes clear, they usually do their best to shove things under the rug with minimal disruption, especially if someone who is well-liked or a leader is involved.S. (rather than UK) higher education, more and more complaints are now being lodged against those who espouse views critical of capitalism, christianity, and right wing conservatism—i. racism and sexism, bullying and harassment, including sexual harassment, ableism, precarity, the aftermath of challenging whiteness and the power structures of the university (‘the canon’ is a topic that obviously comes up), the paradox of committees on diversity and equality, silence and bribery (see especially pages 99-100) and lack of support, as evidenced by unkind reference letters for jobs post-graduate life. 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. A lot of great insights into the process of complaint and also the subtleties of the world that turn innocuous things into complaints. Given this sad reversal, it's an ironic silver lining to read about how unresponsive institutions are to legitimate and galling complaints of harassment, racism and sexism.

Lots of helpful insight about structure and organisations in a sociological/political sense, but plenty of heartbreaking personal testimony to bring the points home. However Sara Ahmed does great job out outlining the philosophies, feminist and otherwise, that really elevates this analysis to the next level. especially when I and others have seen many complaints go through institutional processes that led to nowhere or are ‘buried’, as one participant shared (38).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. Honestly, everything seemed incredibly obvious to me to the point that I thought perhaps I was missing something. The author does not flinch at the difficult intersections where one underrepresented or traditionally marginalized group seems at odds with another; instead, she examines the effects of complaint in each area of these intersections, retaining her sharp focus on an analysis of power dynamics. Ahmed explores how complaints are made behind closed doors and how doors are often closed on those who complain. Many of us know professors who fit this categorisation, those who perform critical analysis but insist on sovereign lecterns or using the traditional classroom space to ‘objectively’ teach.