“Complaint as Diversity Work” – Sara Ahmed 

What can be learnt about the workings of power from those who challenge power? This lecture draws on interviews conducted with staff and students who have made complaints within universities that relate to unfair, unjust or unequal working conditions and to abuses of power such as harassment and bullying. The lecture approaches complaint as a form of diversity work: the work some have to do in order to be accommodated. Making a complaint requires becoming an institutional mechanic: you have to work out how to get a complaint through a system. It is because of the difficulty of getting through that complaints often end up being about the system. The lecture explores how the experiences that lead to complaint and the experiences of complaint are hard to untangle. It reflects on the role of academic networks and professional intimacies in shaping what happens to complaints and to those who complain. 

Featuring

• Ido de Haan, Professor of Political History, Utrecht University, & Queen Wilhelmina Visiting Professor, Columbia University.
• Beatrice de Graaf, Professor of History of International Relations & Global Governance,Utrecht University.
• Brian Vick, Associate Professor of History, Emory University.

Moderated by

• Adam Tooze, Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History & Director of the European Institute.

After the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, the leaders of Europe aimed to establish a new balance of power. The 1815 Congress of Vienna ushered in the emergence of a genuinely European security culture. Securing Europe after Napoleon offers new insights into the military cooperation, ambassadorial conferences, transnational police networks, and international commissions that helped produce stability.

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Lecture by Roham Alvandi 

Throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and the Iranian student opposition abroad, developed contending narratives of human rights in Iran. While Iranian students worked with Western human rights organizations to highlight the use of torture against political prisoners in Iran, the Pahlavi state responded by embracing a Third World narrative of human rights that emphasized state sovereignty at the 1968 UN International Conference on Human Rights in Tehran. In this lecture, Dr. Roham Alvandi examines how both the Shah and his opponents sought to instrumentalize human rights in the international struggle that sparked the Iranian Revolution of 1978-79.

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