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 recently completed a book Complaint! which is forthcoming with Duke University Press in September 2019. Her previous publications include: What’s the Use? On the Uses of Use (2019), Living a Feminist Life (2017), Willful Subjects (2014), On Being Included (2012), The Promise of Happiness (2010), Queer Phenomenology (2006), The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2014, 2004), Strange Encounters (2000) and Differences that Matter (1998).

Keynote: Complaint, Diversity and Other Hostile Environments

28th May 06.00 - 07.30 pm | Sara Ahmed

In this lecture, I 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. I explain 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.