Courageous Conversations

In this lecture, Dr. Ahmed will bring together stories about making complaints by academics and students of colour to show how universities remain hostile environments despite or even through official policies on diversity and inclusion. She explains why doors keep coming up in stories of complaint with specific reference to the “diversity door.” People of colour are assumed to enter that door, which is often shut by appearing to be open. The lecture explores how those who complain become strangers or suspects, “persons to be interrogated.” Complaints about hostile environments are made in hostile environments.

Sara Ahmed is a feminist of colour scholar and writer. Her work addresses how power is experienced and challenged in everyday life and institutional cultures. The lecture is drawn from her book Complaint! which will be published by Duke University Press in September 2021. Previous publications include 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) and Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (2016). Read her full bio.