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. Her most celebrated contribution has been the figure of the Feminist Killjoy, who shares a name with Ahmed’s popular blog, which she began writing alongside her 2017 work, Living a Feminist Life . To negate is to trigger an institution into protecting the status quo through risk-adverse processes that are experienced as violent and exhaustive. The book will appeal to socio-legal scholars interested in the phenomenology of organizations and institutions, especially academia.

Grateful human resources professionals who want to do their job with an equity lens, instead of perpetuating the status quo approach which enables abuses of power.

To make complaints within institutions is to learn how they work and for whom they work: complaint as feminist pedagogy. They’re told it will end their careers, that it will end the careers of the people they should be in allegiance with and depend upon, that it will end everything. Maybe it was partly because I was trying to read it casually while taking care of a newborn, or maybe because mid-way through the book I lost my Kindle at the beach, and so the only way I had to read this was through the Kindle app on my phone, which made those extra-long analytical paragraphs that proliferate in this book seem even longer. 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 was an incredible book that gave voice to so many important stories in a very clear, yet lyrical way.

The file is put away in a cabinet, and the cabinet is in a room, and the door to the room is locked, and that’s that. 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. Yet, the author is repetitive and I think this led me to take much longer to finish the book than it should have. In tandem with On Being Included , her 2012 study of diversity initiatives, it mounts a compelling case against the long-term viability of institutional life as it’s currently configured.To be heard as complaining is often attuned to sound, to how we sound, how we are heard as sounding, to how words sound, to how we sound, how we are heard as sounding, to how words sound, stories too’ (17). 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.

The institution has ways of handling these histories of violence to make them disappear, just like the family can contain the violence that’s happened inside it as a skeleton in the closet. 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. I’m working on The Feminist Killjoy Handbook right now, in which I have a chapter about the feminist killjoy as a poet. I was so compelled by your point, in On Being Included, that the term diversity “can be used as a description or affirmation of anything”—that it’s often seen “as a ‘good’ word precisely because it can be used in diverse ways. This might be due to a narrower definition of "complainant" in the UK legal system compared to the American one, but I couldn't help but wonder about the choice as the book obliquely touched on the semantic difference between "complainant" and "complainer" and how these words are elided in characterizing a complainant.Through the collective, you can assemble and laugh and eat and drink, and remind yourself that the institution isn’t everything. I was so compelled by that story of the students in the anonymous collective, how once they recognized that their formal complaints against a particular professor would go unaddressed, they decided to inscribe all the library copies of his books with an acknowledgement that the author had been accused of sexual abuse. racism and sexism, bullying and harassment, including sexual harassment, ableism, precarity, the aftermath of challenging whiteness and the power structures of the university (‘the canon’ is a topic that obviously comes up), the paradox of committees on diversity and equality, silence and bribery (see especially pages 99-100) and lack of support, as evidenced by unkind reference letters for jobs post-graduate life. The potent reminder that Ahmed offers is that we are not the ones with the problem, that a number of voices raised up in complaint can help identify that the problem lies elsewhere. In Ahmed’s decision to treat the testimonies about complaints on their terms, she weaves an intrinsic activist sensibility through the book.