The (im)possibility of complaint: on efforts of inverting and (en)countering the university

Abstract

Over the past decades, research has documented how endemic racism, sexism, and ableism are in academia. Universities have complaint procedures to address these issues. Much research focuses on individual experiences of making a complaint and the institutional uptake of complaints and demonstrates how such ‘isms’ are located in the individual rather than in the institution. This paper instead scrutinizes how complaint procedures mask and reproduce the structures with which complaints are concerned resulting in the complaints’ limited transformative abilities. I demonstrate how complaint procedures only allow for treating complaints as isolated, singular and unusual events that require temporary solutions, which ensures that complaints and complaint work are peripheralized while the white patriarchal ableist core of universities remains intact. Complaints as efforts of inverting the white patriarchal university are too limited as they are quickly reverted. Hence, what is needed is more than a mere procedure but a total inversion of the institution to make difference fit which requires work that goes in and beyond one’s institution.