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.

The mechanics of the institution not only tell us how institutions work by going through long procedural processes, but also how they reproduce these systems of whiteness, violence and silencing (99-100).This was an incredible book that gave voice to so many important stories in a very clear, yet lyrical way. My writing became more and more about sound, and then, as I was writing the blog and Living a Feminist Life, it just got looser. Or, when discourse is contested, professors will hurl ‘you can’t handle criticism’ (126), which I also hear quite often, a phrase that requires a lot of elaboration in situations involving power. 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! 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’s one line in Audre Lorde’s “Power,” a very difficult and painful poem, about power lying loose and limp as an unconnected wire. 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.first Sara Ahmed ever, shocked by the way her language travels through poetry theory and manifesto so brilliantly. Ahmed explores how complaints are made behind closed doors and how doors are often closed on those who complain. 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.

A lot of the work of complaint is releasing the story of that violence into a wider world and seeing what happens to it. Ahmed has such a way of turning theory into poetry in a way where every sentence resonates like hitting a drum. As many of Ahmed’s participants shared, once they lodge complaints against their supervisors, there can be instant ‘institutional death’ (223). There, I dealt with external committees, whose mission statements mirror legal jargon, yet all conduct ‘informal’ procedural methods.I wonder if your prose style has shifted as your ideas have been taken up—through Feminist Killjoys and your recent books—by readers outside academia? I understand this decision, but this made it much more confusing to track the same complaint across multiple chapters, which is often necessary. Her most celebrated contribution has been the figure of the Feminist Killjoy, who shares a name with Ahmed’s popular blog, which she began writing alongside her 2017 work, Living a Feminist Life . Honestly, everything seemed incredibly obvious to me to the point that I thought perhaps I was missing something. Lastly, (this is more of a personal gripe), "complainer" is constantly used when one would expect "complainant" to be.

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. To open these doors---to get complaints through, keep them going, or keep them alive---Ahmed emphasizes, requires forming new kinds of collectives. Some months have passed since Harvard’s letter scandal, one that captivated our attention because of recurring predatorial behaviours, professorial networks that sustain power and the role of ‘star scholars’.Through the collective, you can assemble and laugh and eat and drink, and remind yourself that the institution isn’t everything. However Sara Ahmed does great job out outlining the philosophies, feminist and otherwise, that really elevates this analysis to the next level. I do not believe I am the intended audience, seems geared towards people in academia or highly bureaucratic fields. 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.