Sara Ahmed: Feminist Ears: Listening to Complaint, Learning about Violence

The British-Australian independent feminist scholar and writer Sara Ahmed will give a lecture at the University of Iceland on Tuesday 24 May at 12. The lecture will be streamed live and takes place in English.

Ahmed says this about her talk: Feminist Ears: Listening to Complaint, Learning about Violence explores why the project of redressing violence including institutional violence (the violence of how institutions respond to violence) requires new ways of listening to complaint or of acquiring feminist ears. In Living a Feminist Life (2017), I described feminist ears as how we hear “the sounds of no, the complaints about violence, the refusal to laugh at sexist jokes” as speech. More recently in Complaint! (2021), I describe feminist ears as a research method, a way of gathering as well as listening to complaints, and as an institutional tactic, a way of pressing against the very institutions in which complaints are made. In this lecture, I will reflect back on what I have learnt from listening to complaints, exploring how the institutional barriers that stop complaints from being heard are the same barriers that enable harassment and bullying. To acquire a feminist ear is thus to come to a better understanding of what it will take to challenge institutional cultures of harassment.

Brynja Elísabeth Halldórsdóttir, associate professor at the University of Iceland’s School of Education and the chairperson of the UI´s Equal Rights Committee, will chair the event.

This event is organised by The UI Professional Council, the UI Equality Officers, the Equal Rights Committee, and the Division of Human Resources.

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 begun a new research project on common sense and is currently writing two handbooks, The Feminist Killjoy Handbook and The Complainer’s Handbook.

Ahmed is a very prolific writer and her previous books include: Complaint! (2021), What's The Use? On the Uses of Use (2019), Living a Feminist Life (2017), Willful Subjects (2014), On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (2012), The Promise of Happiness (2010), Queer Phenomenology: Objects, Orientations, Others (2006), The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2014, 2004), Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (2000) og Differences that Matter: Feminist Theory and Postmodernism (1998).