Center for the Humanities | After Complaint, with Sara Ahmed

In her recent book Complaint!, Sara Ahmed draws on testimonies shared by academics and students who have made complaints about abuses of power such as harassment or bullying or unequal working conditions in universities. In this virtual Humanities Without Boundaries lecture, Ahmed reflects on the book by asking what it means to be after complaint. As one of the participants in her study describes, some complaints “never leave you.” Ahmed will focus on the temporality of complaint, how to complain is to go back over what is not over, as well as on the immanence of complaint, how complaints about hostile environments are made in hostile environments. What do these arguments mean for the research itself, where it can go, and what it can do? Ahmed will draw on data that she was not able to include in the book on the afterlives of complaints and will reflect specifically on some of her experiences, as a woman of colour scholar, of doing and sharing this research.