Complaint!

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I unflinchingly say the word ‘whiteness’ to discuss her arbitrary expectations and she then asks me to explain how I perceive the situation as racist or about whiteness. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. 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.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. That being said, there were some stylistic and structural choices that detracted from the work as a whole. follow the institutional life of a formal complaint: how they begin, how they are processed and how they are ultimately stopped. This Article gives the views and opinions of the authors and does not reflect the views and opinions of the Impact of Social Science blog (the blog), nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science. The book will appeal to socio-legal scholars interested in the phenomenology of organizations and institutions, especially academia.

Though all her interlocutors work in academia, I felt throughout that I could be reading about any other scene from institutional life. 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). I became interested in “the table” in Husserl’s philosophy, which was only a passing reference for him. There’s a lot to learn from paying attention to people’s complaints, and just as much to learn from paying attention to whose complaints are not heard. When bullying and harassment are institutionalized, it’s really hard to challenge them without challenging everything.In the first chapter of the first section, Ahmed notes that some words already carry a complaint; ‘all you have to do is use a word like race and you will be heard as complaining’ (65). Great for those experiencing bullying, harassment, discrimination and abuse of power as well as for those who want to be upstanders and allies for the victims of these abuses of power. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Ahmed] demonstrates a care-infused approach that considers complaints not only as text but also as embodied acts, and bodies as sites of resistance and strength against oppressive institutions. That does not really detract from the overall usefulness of the work and is more of a desire to see this analysis replicated in other industries.

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 idea of escape becomes difficult to separate from the hardships it might bring—reduced access to funds, community, and so on. It kind of changed when I wrote Queer Phenomenology, which in a way is, of all my works, the most located in a philosophical tradition. Only 4 stars because I felt some parts of the text were less accessible, but overall absolutely worth a read for anyone who has ever tried to complain to an institution or has not complained but wanted to. We brought what I thought of as a critical language into it, but the university was able to use the policy—which was about articulating racism in the institution—as evidence of how good it was at race equality.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. Your sentences can feel like a closed loop, in which the same phrases keep iterating—but then they shift such that a new possibility is illuminated.

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. A complaint might be the start of something – so much happens after a complaint is lodged, because it has been lodged – but it is never the starting point’ (20). This succeeds where many other takes on bullying and harassment are too generic and fail to capture what power means if you are in these situations.In Ahmed’s decision to treat the testimonies about complaints on their terms, she weaves an intrinsic activist sensibility through the book. I was somewhere else, in my little cottage in the middle of Cambridgeshire, and being out meant all the stories could come out with me. Meanwhile, the ugly qualities of the incidents complained about often attach themselves to those complaining. Ahmed is brilliant, but her repetitive writing style (which I believe was a thought-out choice) grated on me eventually, despite working for me initially.