Complaint!

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She, like many others, has written that we can organise our worlds in other ways, that we can dismantle existing structures and build better alternative futures, noting wryly that a global pandemic shouldn’t have been the reason for this lesson to be learned (xi). The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. 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.

Insightful and great in many ways, especially as a resource/inspiration for how to complain collectively, especially in institutional contexts where that is all but prohibited. Is it possible to actually change an institution without stealing from it, disfiguring it, or vandalizing it? There’s often a kind of onomatopoeia at work in the language you use to describe the circuitous processes people have to go through to complain. Words like ‘inappropriate’ and ‘unreasonable’ (17) I have also heard, by professors interpreting my own complaints. Sara Ahmed breaks down the systems and methods institutions use to ignore complaints which i found so fascinating.In On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life, Sara Ahmed had already begun an institutional ethnography on the language of diversity and how diversity and its initiatives are institutionalised performative acts. In tandem with On Being Included , her 2012 study of diversity initiatives, it mounts a compelling case against the long-term viability of institutional life as it’s currently configured. Complaints follow a particular procedural pathway, and they are filed and placed in a record, a record that is not only indicative of what happens to a person but also what happens in institutions (38) – or what can be considered the ‘phenomenology of the institution’ (41). Many of us have encountered these acts of power many, many times, and I’m certain we will see more demonstrations and manifestations of it despite what Ahmed’s work should be provoking, which is change to a particular but resistant institution and culture. Given this sad reversal, it's an ironic silver lining to read about how unresponsive institutions are to legitimate and galling complaints of harassment, racism and sexism.

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). She asked if I wanted to work on the project with her, and I said yes, primarily because it was a way of bringing money into the Institute.

To use the Lordeian formulation, the effort to rebuild the master’s house so that it can accommodate those for whom it was not intended cannot be understood purely as a reformist project. She often uses smart allegory like how figurative speech around doors or our fear of strangers pervades institutional logic. Most glaringly, the book is distractingly repetitive, with Ahmed often explaining and rephrasing excerpts from complainant interviews that don't really need to be explained. 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.