Workshop with Sara Ahmed | Complaint Collectives

Following her public lecture, Sara Ahmed will join Stanford students for a workshop based on a discussion of her book Complaint!, published by Duke University Press in 2021. The book draws on oral and written testimonies given by academics and students who made, or considered making, complaints about abuses of power or unequal working conditions at universities.

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The book has two conclusions, which attendees will be asked to read in preparation for the workshop. The first, “Collective Conclusions,” is co-authored by Leila Whitley, Tiffany Page and Alice Corble, with support from Heidi Hasbrouck, Chryssa Sdrolia and others. It is about their experience of working as a collective to challenge sexual harassment and sexual misconduct in the department in which they had been PhD students. They describe collectivity "as a way to share the cost of complaint." The second conclusion, “Complaint Collectives,” by Sara Ahmed reflects on how in making a complaint we become part of a long collective struggle. It considers how complaint collectives are formed to keep complaints going. In the workshop we will consider how and why complaint collectives matter. We might even become one.

About Speaker

Related Reading

Complaint! (Duke University Press, 2021)

You Pose a Problem: A Conversation with Sara Ahmed (The Paris Review)

Ahmed's Good Grief (Public Books)
 

About the Speaker

Sara Ahmed is an independent feminist scholar and writer. Her work is concerned with how power is experienced and challenged in everyday life and institutional cultures. She has begun a new research project on common sense and is currently writing two handbooks, The Feminist Killjoy Handbook and The Complainer’s Handbook. Her previous books include Complaint! (2021), What's The Use? On the Uses of Use (2019), Living a Feminist Life (2017), Willful Subjects (2014), On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (2012), The Promise of Happiness (2010), Queer Phenomenology: Objects, Orientations, Others (2006), The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2014, 2004), Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (2000), and Differences that Matter: Feminist Theory and Postmodernism (1998).