Complaint!

Name: Complaint!
Brand: Tantor Audio
Availability: InStock
Author: Sara Ahmed
ISBN: 9798765021521

Author: Sara Ahmed

Narrator: Pearl Hewitt

Unabridged: 14 hr 32 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 08/02/2022

Categories: Nonfiction, Social Science, Sexual Abuse & Harassment, Education

Synopsis

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.

About Sara Ahmed

Sara Ahmed is a feminist writer, scholar, and activist. She is the author of Willful Subjects, On Being Included, The Promise of Happiness, and Queer Phenomenology, all published by Duke University Press.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Lauren on February 21, 2023

This book was a really interesting read and offers great insight into complaint processes. If you've never initiated a complaint, this book is really great at laying out the barriers and challenges, and if you have, this book can provide some really great vocabulary for reflecting on the experience.......more

Goodreads review by Colleen on May 06, 2022

If you need this book, it will be here for you. It works both to create some form out of the infuriating formlessness of the gap between what institutions say they care about and what they actually do AND as a love letter to those who have tangled with policies and procedures of complaint. Dr. Ahmed......more

Goodreads review by Ionas on July 26, 2022

this was A LOT. first Sara Ahmed ever, shocked by the way her language travels through poetry theory and manifesto so brilliantly. The book isn’t an easy casual read, not necessarily because of the subject, but because of her repetitiveness that grates you to death. Constantly referencing herself an......more

Goodreads review by Sab on May 09, 2023

Listened to this one as an audiobook. A lot of great insights into the process of complaint and also the subtleties of the world that turn innocuous things into complaints. Unfortunately I really didn't like a lot of the stylistic choices made in this book. The constant repetition and reiteration of......more

Goodreads review by Chloe on March 11, 2023

Great book with deep insight into the failure of the complaints procedure within academia, on purpose, to work for those who make complaints, rather for the institution itself. Yet, the author is repetitive and I think this led me to take much longer to finish the book than it should have.......more