The New School’s Mellon Initiative for Inclusive Faculty Excellence is excited to invite you to a talk by Sara Ahmed "Killjoys at Work." To be a feminist killjoy is to be a killjoy at work. We work on institutions as well as at them. In this lecture Sara explores what we come to know about institutions from our efforts to transform them. She will draw especially from two chapters “The Feminist Killjoy as Philosopher” and “The Feminist Killjoy as Activist” in her newly published The Feminist Killjoy Handbook. To be killjoys at work means being willing to confront institutional problems, to question how diversity is happily claimed by organizations, and to challenge how they use our efforts to change them as evidence they have changed. To be killjoys at work also requires being alert to how the figure of the feminist killjoy can be appropriated and neutralized. We have to find other institutional killjoys, because the more we come up against, the more we need more. With Deva Woodly (Brown University) as discussant.
The talk will be followed by a reception for Sara Ahmed’s new book, The Feminist Killjoy Handbook. Introduced by Dr. Renée T. White. Copies will be available for purchase and signing.
Sara Ahmed is an independent queer feminist scholar of colour. Her work is concerned with how power is experienced and challenged in everyday life and institutional cultures. The Feminist Killjoy Handbook, published by Seal Press, is her first trade book. Previous books published (all published by Duke University Press) 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) and Queer Phenomenology: Objects, Orientations, Others (2006). She is currently writing A Complainer’s Handbook: A Guide to Building Less Hostile Institutions and has begun a new project on common sense.
She blogs at feministkilljoy.com. You can find her on twitter @SaraNAhmed and Instagram @SaraNoAhmed.
Presented by Mellon Initiative for Inclusive Faculty Excellence in the Office of the Provost and co-hosted Gender & Sexuality Studies Institute.
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