Later this year, I hope to do some informal launch events for the book focusing primarily on discussions with students and academics involved in activist projects at universities. According to the publisher: "examines what we can learn about power from those who complain about abuses of power. Sara Ahmed always has her finger on the pulse of the times as she assists us to explore the deeper meanings and philosophical nuances of quotidian concepts and practices. I was inspired by my experience of supporting a collective complaint about sexual misconduct and sexual harassment that was lodged by PhD students.

Complaint! A Book Launch and a Complaint Collective - Sara Ahmed Complaint! A Book Launch and a Complaint Collective - Sara Ahmed

It would be naive to think that sexual misconduct is somehow immune from the possibility of vexatious complaint. 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. Words like ‘inappropriate’ and ‘unreasonable’ (17) I have also heard, by professors interpreting my own complaints.

On paper, a complaint can be pictured as a flow-chart, with straight lines and pointy arrows, giving the would-be complainer a clear route through. I think of their combined work as counterinstitutional, they teach us how universities work, for whom they work. I didn’t take his advice, but I have never forgotten those foreboding words, especially now that I have heard from other professors that I should keep my head down and do my work. These enduring habits of thought may explain why, contrary to popular myth, it is on the whole far from easy to pursue complaints of sexual misconduct.

Sara Ahmed Complaint! Durham: Duke University Press, 2021

Creating Equality, Diversity and Inclusion initiatives does not actually include those who remain opposed to and harmed by the neoliberal university. Concern for the interests of students is a thin cover for the advancement of a marketising agenda: the subjection of higher education – like the health sector and so much else – to the competitive logic of the market, with the failure of some individuals and institutions (‘market exit’) an essential part of the process.It is shocking that such bravery is still needed to draw attention to this institutional cover up of sexual harassment.

Complaint! - De Gruyter Complaint! - De Gruyter

Implicit in Ahmed’s discussion is a kind of gradualism: no silver bullets, but the prospect of incremental change over time, brought about by complaint. But its disciplinary mechanisms share some of the characteristics put forward by critics of carceralism: the tendency for complaints disproportionately to target, or to backfire on, the more vulnerable or marginalised members of a community; the tendency for those who make complaints of sexual violence or misconduct to be revictimised by the process of complaint; the failure to hold individual perpetrators of (especially sexual) violence to account, let alone to address its root causes.A group of students report that ‘they were dissuaded from lodging a complaint about sexual harassment. Without some determined resistance of a kind to which academics appear to be constitutionally averse, higher education is set to continue on its current trajectory of marketisation, with all its deleterious consequences for staff and students.

Complaint!, by Sara Ahmed | Times Higher Education (THE)

I am talking to a postgraduate student about her experience of trying to make a complaint about gender-based based harassment and bullying. Sara Ahmed follows the institutional life of complaints within the university, exploring how they begin, how they are processed and how they are ultimately stopped, thereby reproducing systems of whiteness, violence and silencing. 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.Occasionally the calculus favours the swift – and usually discreet – removal of someone who has become a liability, though this is less often a removal than a relocation (the ‘pass the harasser’ phenomenon, whereby men accused of sexual harassment are allowed to ‘move on’, only for similar allegations to arise at another institution). There was some connection between the loosening of my writing style—trying to get at the affect and the sound of the thing I was describing—and feeling more directly connected to readers. The blog is a companion to her book Living a Feminist Life (2017) that enables her to reach people; posts become chapters and the book becomes blogging material. There have been cases in the US of Title IX protections (which prohibit sex-based discrimination in education) being misused to attack queer academics, for instance. Are there other people who have influenced you as you made that transition, loosening your attachment to the genre of academic writing?