Complaint!

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In Chapter Seven, other contributors wrote ‘Collective Conclusions’, detailing their first collaboration on a report on their department which documented the sexualisation and abuses of powers they witnessed or experienced during their studies (264). These theoretical considerations are themselves violent (134; read, too, an example of a Title IX case at Harvard University, where theoretical assumptions are harmful).

Ahmed illuminates how institutions like the university are designed for precisely the people who can and continue to flourish while miming theoretical righteousness and perpetuating violent norms. A lot of the work of complaint is releasing the story of that violence into a wider world and seeing what happens to it.

Meanwhile, the ugly qualities of the incidents complained about often attach themselves to those complaining. This is a book worth spending plenty of time with if you're someone in academia or someone who is interested in how organisations can weaponise the very systems 'designed' to protect.

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. Much of the work of revolution comes from what you learn by trying to build more just worlds alongside other people. That being said, there were some stylistic and structural choices that detracted from the work as a whole.

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. Ahmed is brilliant, but her repetitive writing style (which I believe was a thought-out choice) grated on me eventually, despite working for me initially. This book explores those ideas to a profound depth and if you think that sounds interesting id recommend this book to you.

These insides will make my walk as a diversity, equity, inclusion and anti-racism professional much more effective. is precisely the text we need at this moment as we seek to understand and transform the institutional structures promoting racism and heteropatriarchy.It was a permanent job in one of the largest women’s studies programs in Europe, and I was in an incredibly supportive feminist environment. If I wanted to stay in the department, he suggested, I would have to find a way to ‘submit’ in the least humiliating way for myself. When I think about both Gulzar and Lauren, I think about how the tightness or narrowness of words—of pronouns, say—can be experienced as giving you no room. before resigning, but doing so allowed the work to find new life, traveling beyond the closed doors and brick walls of the university, into the wide-open field of public discourse.

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. Creating Equality, Diversity and Inclusion initiatives does not actually include those who remain opposed to and harmed by the neoliberal university.

The complaints compiled in the book range from institutional violence (the focus of Part Three, ‘If These Doors Could Talk? I ask these rhetorical questions with Ahmed’s poignant gesture to the role of power in mind: ‘those who challenge how power works come to know how power works’ (47). As many of Ahmed’s participants shared, once they lodge complaints against their supervisors, there can be instant ‘institutional death’ (223).