Complaint!

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It works both to create some form out of the infuriating formlessness of the gap between what institutions say they care about and what they actually do AND as a love letter to those who have tangled with policies and procedures of complaint. 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.

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. 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. What, then, is the function of the university, these external committees and the role of a professor? For a while, I had been doing work on race and strangers—who gets seen as a body out of place within neighborhoods—but eventually I turned my attention to the university itself.

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. At my former university, a group of students put together a collective complaint, anonymously, about sexual harassment and misconduct.

This book offers a systematic analysis of the methods used to stop complaints and a powerful and poetic meditation on what complaints can be used to do. 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. There, I dealt with external committees, whose mission statements mirror legal jargon, yet all conduct ‘informal’ procedural methods. and relating my own experiences above, the recurring issues she raises point to the radical need for deep structural change in universities.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. The idea of escape becomes difficult to separate from the hardships it might bring—reduced access to funds, community, and so on. Those who follow Ahmed’s work will be well aware that she traces the genealogy of words – verbs, nouns, as subjects or as objects – and how their meanings may change depending on their uses.

These theoretical considerations are themselves violent (134; read, too, an example of a Title IX case at Harvard University, where theoretical assumptions are harmful).The complaints compiled in the book range from institutional violence (the focus of Part Three, ‘If These Doors Could Talk? 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. But I think the thing that really slowed me down the most was the style in which the book is written. When you make a complaint about harassment that’s endemic to a university, you’re pitting yourself against people who don’t want that problem to be recognized. If you've never initiated a complaint, this book is really great at laying out the barriers and challenges, and if you have, this book can provide some really great vocabulary for reflecting on the experience.