Complaint!

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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. I didn’t have any publications, but they interviewed me, and they hired me, partly, I think, because I was so enthusiastic.

This might be due to a narrower definition of "complainant" in the UK legal system compared to the American one, but I couldn't help but wonder about the choice as the book obliquely touched on the semantic difference between "complainant" and "complainer" and how these words are elided in characterizing a complainant. 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).Through the extensive use of the door metaphor, Sarah Ahmed offers the language and understanding that is needed to tend to the wounds of exclusion and rejection. I disagree with the role of the proposed supervisory arrangement, in which my would-be supervisor suggests I should satisfy her expectations for a dissertation. On Twitter, I saw scholars proclaiming the need to purge letter signatories from their citational practices, a statement that I find gestures to an individual response and practice rather than a structural one.

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. And those books weren’t purely descriptive or analytical—they also formed part of the real-life work you were doing to try to change the institution you inhabited.

Lancaster was an incredibly white institution, and I’d already been aware of that, obviously, as one of the very few academics of color employed there.

So many people seem to go into academia with the idea that it will be a kind of refuge for their wonder. 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. Sometimes people use words like “diversity”—friendlier, happier words—because they’re just trying to get things unstuck. 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. 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.There's probably a way to have the information condensed and one could just present it in a direct form, but then it would not highlight the writing style.