“A question can be a journey” (2019) wrote Sara Ahmed in her feminist killjoys blog When we question the neoliberal university with complaint, where can it lead us? “To become a complainer is to become the location of a problem” (Ahmed 2021). Perhaps we complain among ourselves, or we don’t complain for fear of losing funding or not getting tenure or not getting a good mark or a sessional gig. If we complain together are we safer? How can we mobilize complaint into action? In this virtual round table discussion we are asking academics, activists and artists to discuss their complaints with the university – academic freedom, colonial systems and structures, market-driven pedagogy, precarious labour, branding, and beyond. How can complaint become a site of learning and transformation?
Complaint & the Neoliberal University is a round table, with artists, academics and students discussing the particular issues around which they advocate, i.e.., the efficacy and role of official complaint, petition, protest, grievance etc vs collective action, in relation to media. It will include Eleni Schirmer from Montreal, speaking to student debt and the work of the Debt Collective, and Dr Heather Milne from University of Winnipeg with complaints (and solutions) regarding the doubled labour of female academics with children during online teaching.
Dr. Hayden King is Anishinaabe from Beausoleil First Nation on Gchi’mnissing in Huronia, Ontario. He is the Executive Director of the Yellowhead Institute and Advisor to the Dean of Arts on Indigenous Education at Ryerson University. King has been teaching Indigenous politics and policy since 2007 at McMaster, Carleton and Ryerson Universities. Hayden’s analysis and commentary on Indigenous nationhood and settler colonialism in Canada is published widely. He is a prolific thinker and contributor to the national conversation on Indigenous issues.
Amber Grant is the former Chief Steward for CUPE 3904 Unit 3 and a current member of the CUPE 3904 Unit 3 bargaining team.
Dr. Alyson Brickey is Assistant Professor in the Department of English. Her teaching and research focuses on nineteenth and twentieth-century American literature and critical theory, particularly the relationship between experimental literary aesthetics and philosophical ethics.
Dr. Heather Milne is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Winnipeg. Her current research focuses on contemporary North American feminist poetics with a specific interest in the ways in which 21st century women poets engage with neoliberalism, global capitalism, and feminism.
