Complaint!

Complaint!
Sara Ahmed
RRP:
NZ$ 63.99
Our Price:
NZ$ 57.59
Paperback
h229 x 152mm - 376pg
24 Sep 2021 US
International import eta 7-19 days
9781478017714
Out Of Stock
Currently no stock in-store, stock is sourced to your order
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 does happen. 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 upon 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.
"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. Beautifully written and thoroughly engaging, Complaint! is precisely the text we need at this moment as we seek to understand and transform institutional structures promoting racism and heteropatriarchy. " -- Angela Y. Davis "In her latest contribution to our knowledge, Sara Ahmed gifts us with a book about the phenomenology of complaint and the layered entangled complexity of how power works institutionally. She foregrounds that to complain is to transgress. To transgress is to become a site of negation. To negate is to trigger an institution into protecting the status quo through risk adverse processes that are experienced as violent and exhaustive. Ahmed' s intellectually expansive book achieves two things: it exposes the meaning, experiences, and perceptions of complaint and provides testimony to the courage of those who complain, who fight, who believe justice should not just be seen to be done; it must be done. " -- Aileen Moreton-Robinson, author of * Talkin' Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism * "[Ahmed] presents a strong argument that power in higher education tends to protect itself, that diversity initiatives are often nothing more than window dressing, and that those who file complaints about a hostile work environment often face accusations of disloyalty or troublemaking. . . . Most of the charges here are broad and general, but anyone who has worked in higher education will recognize much of what Ahmed brings to light. Sharp criticism of an overlooked systemic problem in higher education. " * Kirkus Reviews * "In her powerful new book . . . Sara Ahmed builds on a series of oral and written testimonies from students and employees who have complained to higher education universities about harassment and inequality. Here, she asks readers to think about some inescapable questions: What happens when complaints are pushed under the rug? How is complaint radical feminism? And, how can we learn about power from those who choose to fight against the powerful? " -- Rebecca Schneid * Indy Week *
Sara Ahmed is an independent scholar and author of What' s the Use? , Living a Feminist Life, and other books also published by Duke University Press.
Status: No local stock, title imported to order
ISBN-13: 9781478017714
Published: 24 Sep 2021
Published In: United States
Imprint: Duke University Press
Publisher: Duke University Press
Format: Paperback
Height: 229mm
Width: 152mm
Pages: 376

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