A complaint can be an expression of grief, pain or dissatisfaction; something that is a cause of a protest or outcry, a bodily ailment or a formal allegation. Sara Ahmed explores in this lecture how the latter sense of complaint as formal allegation brings up these other more effective and embodied senses. Complaints can be expressed without anything even being said; they often come out “in the thick of it,” that is, right in the middle of an intense or difficult situation. At time of growing discussions in Brussels about power, discrimination and harassment in academic contexts, this lecture of Ahmed draws on interviews with staff and students who have made (or considered making) complaints about abuses of power within universities. Complaints teach us how “the personal is institutional.” Sara Ahmed is a scholar whose area of study includes the intersection of feminist theory, lesbian feminism, queer theory, critical race theory and postcolonialism. In 2016 she resigned from her post at Goldsmiths in protest over the alleged sexual harassment of students by staff  there.

Confronted with the SARS-CoV-2 crisis, we had to cancel this project