After Complaint

In my recent book Complaint! (2021), I draw on testimonies shared by academics and students who have made complaints about abuses of power such as harassment or bullying or unequal working conditions in universities. In this lecture I reflect back on the process of writing the book, asking what it means to be "after complaint" given that, as one of the participants in my study describes, some complaints “never leave you.” I will focus on the temporality of complaint, how to complain is to go back over what is not over, as well as on the immanence of complaint, how complaints about hostile environments are made in hostile environments. What do these arguments mean for the research itself, where it can and cannot go, and what it can and cannot do? I will share some data that I was not able to include in the book on the afterlives of complaints and will reflect specifically on my experiences, as a woman of colour scholar, of doing as well as presenting this research.

6-730 pm GMT

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