No Is Not A Lonely Utterance: The Art and Activism of Complaining with Sara Ahmed

Join us in conversation with Sara Ahmed on her new book : No Is A Lonely Utterance.

‘Behind many disasters are unheard complaints’

To complain is an intimate, dangerous act. Whether it’s speaking up about racism in the workplace or taking a stand against sexual harassment at university, the act of complaining to an institution can leave you isolated and undermined, all while the original injustice remains unresolved. Time and time again, we see these unanswered complaints compound to disastrous effect.

In No is Not a Lonely Utterance, Sara Ahmed dissects the anatomy of a complaint, revealing how institutions create hostile environments that stigmatize complainers, and charts a way we can listen to grievances with ‘feminist ears’: going beyond mere validation and seeking instead to address the root causes of injustice and inequality.

Weaving together testimonies from various walks of life, Ahmed shows us what we learn about the ways institutions exercise their power when complaints are raised, and indeed what we learn about our capacity to collectivize and create social bonds through complaint. In doing so, she inspires us to create better environments for our life’s work.

About the Author:

Sara Ahmed is an independent feminist scholar who works at the intersection of feminist, queer and race studies. Her research is concerned with how bodies and worlds take shape; and how power is secured and challenged in everyday life as well as institutional cultures. She has published eleven books including The Feminist Killjoy Handbook.

About Noreen Masud

Noreen Masud is a Senior Lecturer in Twentieth Century Literature at the University of Bristol, an author of creative non-fiction, and an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker. She is the author of A Flat Place, which weaves her impressions of the natural world with the poetry, folklore and history of the land, and with recollections of her own early life, rendering a startlingly strange, vivid and intimate account of a post-traumatic, post-colonial landscape - a seemingly flat and motionless place which is nevertheless defiantly alive.

Praise for No Is Not a Lonely Utterance

‘Sara Ahmed always has her finger on the pulse of the times’ – Angela Davis

‘A brilliant feminist thinker… Ahmed moves from scene to scene with clarity, rage, and joy, building through each refrain to mark the brutal violence of everyday encounters’ – Judith Butler

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