Sara Ahmed

Complaint!

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Complaint!
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In Complaint! Sara Ahmed examines what we can learn about power from those who complain about abuses of power.
 
Drawing on oral and written testimonies from academics and students who have made complaints about harassment, bullying, and unequal working conditions at universities, Ahmed explores the gap between what is supposed to happen when complaints are made and what actually happens.
 
To make complaints within institutions is to learn how they work and for whom they work: complaint as feminist pedagogy. Ahmed explores how complaints are made behind closed doors and how doors are often closed on those who complain. To open these doors---to get complaints through, keep them going, or keep them alive---Ahmed emphasizes, requires forming new kinds of collectives. 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. Following a long lineage of Black feminist and feminist of color critiques of the university, Ahmed delivers a timely consideration of how institutional change becomes possible and why it is necessary.

Author: Sara Ahmed

Paperback Published September 2021 376 pages

“Sara Ahmed always has her finger on the pulse of the times as she assists us to explore the deeper meanings and philosophical nuances of quotidian concepts and practices. Beautifully written and thoroughly engaging, Complaint! is precisely the text we need at this moment as we seek to understand and transform the institutional structures promoting racism and heteropatriarchy.” — Angela Y. Davis

“In her latest contribution to our knowledge, Sara Ahmed gifts us with a book about the phenomenology of complaint and the layered, entangled complexity of how power works institutionally. She foregrounds that to complain is to transgress. To transgress is to become a site of negation. To negate is to trigger an institution into protecting the status quo through risk-adverse processes that are experienced as violent and exhaustive. Ahmed’s intellectually expansive book achieves two things: it exposes the meaning, experiences, and perceptions of complaint and provides testimony to the courage of those who complain, who fight, who believe justice should not just appear to be done; it must be done.” — Aileen Moreton-Robinson, author of Talkin’ Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism

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