In this special lecture, Sara Ahmed reflects on what it means to give “a feminist ear” to complaint. Marking the publication of her new book No is Not a Lonely Utterance: The Art and Activism of Complaining (2025), and coinciding with Autumn Knight’s exhibition I Can't Complain, Ahmed considers how complaint can bring us together, enabling new solidarities and alliances in the struggle for change.

In 2013, Ahmed sat down with students who had made a collective complaint about sexual harassment. After resigning from her academic post in protest at her university’s failure to address sexual harassment, she began, in 2016, interviewing students and academics who had complained about discrimination and harassment in universities. Their experiences became the basis of her 2021 book Complaint!.

Her new book, No is Not a Lonely Utterance: The Art and Activism of Complaining, continues this exploration, asking what complaint can make possible: how speaking out, sharing experiences, and refusing to let injustice go unchallenged can become forms of collective action. Ahmed continues to write about other people’s complaints, while also making some of her own.

In her forthcoming book Common Sense and its Others, she considers why complaints can be useful precisely because they are impractical, drawing on the example of civil rights activist Pauli Murray, who made complaint after complaint over many years in challenging racism and segregation.

If we have to keep making the same complaints because the same things keep happening, repetition can bring exhaustion. But it can also generate creativity: new ways of speaking, new forms of solidarity, and new possibilities for change.

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