Thread by @UMBCHumanities

This afternoon is the big event: the Joan S. Korenman lecture with @SaraNAhmed at 7pm in the Fine Arts Recital Hall: "Complaint as Diversity Work." The event is free and will be recorded. Hope to see you there!

A lot of excitement this evening. Here is @SaraNAhmed with a fellow feminist killjoy @ameliameman of @womencenterumbc

The annual Korenman lecture is named in honor of Joan Korenman, the founding director of @UMBC_GWST and the Center for Women in Technology

Ahmed: I want to give room for complaint. Listen to complaint. The fact that the act of making a complaint can be used against you:

“If I was well enough to stamp my foot and complain then I was well enough to work.”

Ahmed: A complaint can lead you to recognize what is shared, as well as the scale of that problem.

Ahmed: institutions are built with a cloistered, suffocating feeling: the long corridors, doors with locks, windows with blinds that come down

Ahmed: These tell us how universities work or who they work for. Who is allowed to breathe while others suffocate?

Ahmed: Filing a complaint often requires you to become an institutional mechanic. On paper it can appear that making a complaint is a linear process; rather it is circular

Sometimes acknowledgment complaints can be used be used by an institution to demonstrate that the issue has been resolved. Ahmed’s research exists in between the place where a complaint is made and a resolution occurs

To mind the gap is to listen and learn from those who have experienced a process. Diversity is “a big shiny apple”, “it all looks wonderful but the inequalities aren’t being addressed.”

Doing the work of diversity feels like banging your head up against the wall. The wall never moves and it is only you who feels so sore. You have only scratched the surface.

Complaining is “like bring trapped in some kind of weird dream where you knoe you jump from one section to another because you never know the narrative. I think that’s the powe that institutional abuse has on you.”

You can stop someone from doing something by making it harder for them.

“I don’t want to do something that is going to threaten a programme that is supposed to diversify the faculty” (coercive diversity)

Even a “yes” can deter a complaint. A “yes” is actually a “we’ll see. This is a form of non-performativity: getting a yes can often defuse the energy of the complainer. You let off just enough steam to relieve pressure and prevent an explosion.

If organizations can disqualify complaints because they took too long to be filed, they can delay their response to the initial complaint. Exhaustion is not only a result, but the point of a complaint process (a management technique)

“I feel like my complaint...has gone into the complaint graveyard.”

We need to remember that a complaint is a record of what has happened to a PERSON

You can become a killjoy just by not laughing at a joke that you find offensive.

You can make the complaint go away (like magic), but the harassment remains.

A complaint is treated as a broken record, as if you are stuck on the same point. The complaint becomes about you and YOUR issues.

To encounter a wall is to learn that what has been deemed the quality of a thing (the university is open) is in fact the quality of a relation (the university is open to some).

The more “nots” you are means that you are on more diversity committees.

“I was on the equality/diversity group and as soon as I started to mention race, they changed the portfolio of who can be on the committee and I was dropped”

A diversity practioner recounted that they only had to open her mouth in a meeting before she saw eyes rolling and hearing them say “oh there you go.”

Eye rolling becomes feminist pedagogy.

The door teaches us the significance of having to lodge a complaint about harassment in the same place the harassment happened.

A complaint becomes your failure to resolve a situation more amicably.

To hear a complaint is to hear from those weighed down by a history that has not left a trace in the official records.

A complaint can function like a switch, an alsrm, or an alert; that triggers a reaction, which is to say, a complaint is how a network comes alive.

“Be careful he is an important man.”

We are often asked “How do you know its abouut race?” Racism is how we know its about race!

Whiteness is reproduced as sympathy. A Black woman who refuses to reconcile with a colleague is deemed as “mean” and pushed out a department. POC are viewed as a revolving door; you can often seen what is in by what is going out.

Diversity work means transforming institutions in order to survive them; surviving the institutions we are trying to transform. It can also be the work we do to survive the work we do.

Closing a door can be a method of surviving for complaint activists. For some, the method of complaining is an act of war.

In order for information to come out, we have to become leaks

We find each other through complaints. Even if they lead us to leave, we leave something of ourselves behind. In saying no, we keep a history alive. Sometimes you hold on by passing a refusal on

Scratches on a wall act as testimony. Complaints can come back to haunt institutions; WE can haunt institutions.

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