Complaint!

Product Information

The book will appeal to socio-legal scholars interested in the phenomenology of organizations and institutions, especially academia. It’s not only that there’s a gap between statements about inclusivity and diversity and what actually happens.

I do not believe I am the intended audience, seems geared towards people in academia or highly bureaucratic fields. This accounts for a large portion of the book and while there is sometimes really great insight and analysis, it makes the book feel really bloated. They just invoked some vague idiosyncrasy to explain away his bad behavior, which might otherwise be confused for something sinister—heavy and historical and violent—something that could, if it were named, prove to be a liability.In the early years of your academic career—when you focused on postmodernism, postcolonialism, queer phenomenology, affect theory—you were, essentially, producing theory.

The book covers great topic and I'm glad it exist, but that doesn't fix obvious flaws I see as a reader. To be heard as complaining is often attuned to sound, to how we sound, how we are heard as sounding, to how words sound, to how we sound, how we are heard as sounding, to how words sound, stories too’ (17). Sara Ahmed builds on a series of oral and written testimonies from students and employees who have complained to higher education universities about harassment and inequality. In Ahmed’s decision to treat the testimonies about complaints on their terms, she weaves an intrinsic activist sensibility through the book.The idea of escape becomes difficult to separate from the hardships it might bring—reduced access to funds, community, and so on.

I am so grateful to Leila Whitley, Tiffany Page, Alice Corble—with support from Heidi Hasbrouck, Chryssa Sdrolia, and others—for writing one of conclusions of Complaint! I’ve heard the ending offers some light at the end of the tunnel, so I do plan to go back and look for that. 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. I was very conscious of how administrators in charge of diversity initiatives would try to maximize the distance between themselves and the complainers.At the same time, the most inventive academic work comes from those who occupy precarious positions. And, of course, Ahmed’s work was in constant circulation, which I find both encouraging as much as it raises suspicion.