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Complaint!

Complaint!

RRP: £26.47
Price: £13.235
£13.235 FREE Shipping

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Description

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.

Formal complaints can sound just like the master’s tools—bureaucratic, dry, tedious—but they’re also where you actually come to hear and learn about institutional mechanics, how institutions reproduce themselves.I ask these rhetorical questions with Ahmed’s poignant gesture to the role of power in mind: ‘those who challenge how power works come to know how power works’ (47). I still remember the sense of wonder—that it was possible to stay a student, to stay in a place of learning, to be surrounded by learning. Ahmed explores how complaints are made behind closed doors and how doors are often closed on those who complain.

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. 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. 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. before resigning, but doing so allowed the work to find new life, traveling beyond the closed doors and brick walls of the university, into the wide-open field of public discourse.

Complaining as a speech act may have negative connotations, but Ahmed draws our attention to complaint as a form of feminist pedagogy. A lot of people talked to me about how when they tried to make complaints, it was often the diversity agenda that would be used against them—as if they weren’t doing this the right way, as if they weren’t being appealing enough, as if by even using certain words they were trying to make life difficult for other people, including other minoritized staff. And those books weren’t purely descriptive or analytical—they also formed part of the real-life work you were doing to try to change the institution you inhabited.

Great for those experiencing bullying, harassment, discrimination and abuse of power as well as for those who want to be upstanders and allies for the victims of these abuses of power. She, like many others, has written that we can organise our worlds in other ways, that we can dismantle existing structures and build better alternative futures, noting wryly that a global pandemic shouldn’t have been the reason for this lesson to be learned (xi). Meanwhile, the ugly qualities of the incidents complained about often attach themselves to those complaining.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. Ahmed likens complaints to biographies that tell a particular life story, reminding us that data is as experiential as it is theoretical (18): ‘The term complaint biography helps us to think of the life of a complaint in relation to the life of a person or a group of people […] To think of a complaint biography is to recognize that a complaint, in being lodged somewhere, starts somewhere else. As the author makes clear, they usually do their best to shove things under the rug with minimal disruption, especially if someone who is well-liked or a leader is involved. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. by emphasising how ‘complaints are not heard or how we are not heard when we are heard as complaining’ (3).



  • Fruugo ID: 258392218-563234582
  • EAN: 764486781913
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