As many of Ahmed’s participants shared, once they lodge complaints against their supervisors, there can be instant ‘institutional death’ (223). When I think about both Gulzar and Lauren, I think about how the tightness or narrowness of words—of pronouns, say—can be experienced as giving you no room. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. It can be incredibly painful to know what happened, to know what you went through, but still you can’t say it, you can’t get it out. I make it clear that I welcome feedback with which I can engage and even reject, but I suggest that a dissertation is a project that I shape that does not belong to her expectations.

There’s often a kind of onomatopoeia at work in the language you use to describe the circuitous processes people have to go through to complain. 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, of course, Ahmed’s work was in constant circulation, which I find both encouraging as much as it raises suspicion. A lot of the work of complaint is releasing the story of that violence into a wider world and seeing what happens to it. Sometimes people use words like “diversity”—friendlier, happier words—because they’re just trying to get things unstuck.

In a similar vein, Ahmed choses not to give the interviewees aliases and instead briefly describes their circumstances (ex: a Black queer woman academic who made a complaint about racism and sexism in her department. Her resignation was an act of protest against the institution’s culture of sexual harassment and thus, as Ahmed wrote on her blog, a “feminist issue. On the one hand, their concerns are deemed inconsequential—they’re trying to make something out of nothing—and on the other, they’re presented as malicious and threatening, as if they have the power to singlehandedly take the whole institution down.is precisely the text we need at this moment as we seek to understand and transform the institutional structures promoting racism and heteropatriarchy. Much of the work of revolution comes from what you learn by trying to build more just worlds alongside other people. Sara Ahmed, again, names what has needed to be named for so long: " To complain is to learn about power, and you cannot go back to who you were before you made the complaint. But I think the thing that really slowed me down the most was the style in which the book is written. 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.