Complaint!

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She often uses smart allegory like how figurative speech around doors or our fear of strangers pervades institutional logic.

There was a lot of media coverage of your departure from academia, but I’m curious to know more about your early relationship to it. I saw myself in this book, and it has given me a language for the things I learnt the hard way in academia. The stories Ahmed tells will be familiar to anyone who has attempted to seek redress (or merely recognition) from an institution trained against them.Ahmed likens complaints to biographies that tell a particular life story, reminding us that data is as experiential as it is theoretical (18): ‘The term complaint biography helps us to think of the life of a complaint in relation to the life of a person or a group of people […] To think of a complaint biography is to recognize that a complaint, in being lodged somewhere, starts somewhere else.

This book explores those ideas to a profound depth and if you think that sounds interesting id recommend this book to you. 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. In-depth, thorough, beautifully articulated study of complaint in academic institutions, which takes care with the voices of people in difficult situations, who come to feel the power of these institutions. 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.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. Ahmed has such a way of turning theory into poetry in a way where every sentence resonates like hitting a drum. Her resignation was an act of protest against the institution’s culture of sexual harassment and thus, as Ahmed wrote on her blog, a “feminist issue. We weren’t sitting around talking about, I don’t know, affect theory—which is not to say it’s not interesting to sit around and talk about affect theory! 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.