Complaint!
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- $39.99
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- $39.99
Publisher Description
In Complaint! Sara Ahmed examines what we can learn about power from those who complain about abuses of power. Drawing on oral and written testimonies from academics and students who have made complaints about harassment, bullying, and unequal working conditions at universities, Ahmed explores the gap between what is supposed to happen when complaints are made and what actually happens. To make complaints within institutions is to learn how they work and for whom they work: complaint as feminist pedagogy. Ahmed explores how complaints are made behind closed doors and how doors are often closed on those who complain. To open these doors---to get complaints through, keep them going, or keep them alive---Ahmed emphasizes, requires forming new kinds of collectives. 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. 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Feminist scholar Ahmed (What's the Use?) analyzes in this scholarly account the shortcomings of the formal complaint process at universities. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with students and faculty who have made complaints, as well as her own frustrating experience trying to help a group of students navigate the process of making a collective sexual harassment complaint, Ahmed indentifies "institutional mechanics" that keep complaints from being heard. These include an insistence on formal written letters of complaint, which require students to give up their anonymity and may imperil their future careers, and a tendency to give more weight to accusations made or supported by those in positions of power. Ahmed also discusses how people who make complaints often discover that others have done so previously, and suggests that by "forming a complaint collective... those who are cast out can pull together, leap into the unknown." Ahmed anonymizes and obscures these cases in order to protect people's privacy, which makes it difficult to keep track of which example she's talking about, and her knotty prose sometimes muddies the waters ("The sociality of how complaints are expressed is another way of considering the effects of how complaints are contained"). This hyper-focused study leaves the broader implications of Ahmed's research unexplored.
