Ahmed teaches us how much we can learn from complaints. “The path of a complaint… teaches us something about how institutions work,” what she calls institutional mechanics.

My methodological approach comes from thinking along with Sara Ahmed’s work on complaint. By “complaint”, I mean grievances we lodge within our workplaces, which can look both like formal complaints made to human resources (excuse me, I mean “people operations”) and informal complaints which we hold between our peers, comrades, and friends. Anyone who has engaged in the process of a formal complaint can tell you how exhausting it is to register one, how management and decision-makers can stall, and how much one has to relive their trauma to do so.