IMMA presents a keynote lecture by internationally renowned writer and scholar Sara Ahmed, who offers critical reflection on the role queer methodologies play in disrupting the normative use of our public institutions, with a lecture titled Complaint as a Queer Method.

In continuing her work and participation in wider critiques of utilitarianism as an educational framework to interrogate what is useful knowledge Ahmed’s most recent book What’s the Use: On the Uses of Use (2019) explores what “I call simply ‘queer use,’ how things can be used in ways that were not intended or by those for whom they were not intended”. In the conclusion of the book, she argues that it is not enough to affirm the queerness of use: to queer use often requires a world-dismantling effort. This lecture begins where the book What’s the Use ends, exploring the work of dismantling institutions as the work of complaint. Complaints teach us how institutions are built for some to use, as well as what we need to do to open-up institutions to others.

Building on the powerful blog series ‘feministkilljoys’, Ahmed’s work is inspired by scholars working on questions of race, colonialism, gender, sexuality, and disability who write from or about “bodies out of place”, “misfits”, or “troublemakers”, including Judith Butler, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Aimi Hamraie, Alison Kafer, Heidi Mirza, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Nirmal Puwar, Shirley Anne Tate, Gloria Wekker, as well as many others.

Presented in the context of CHROMA – a public programme that brings together artists, creative practitioners, educators, activists and designers to respond to methodologies of queer thinking and ideas of ‘intersectionality’ and ‘Protest’ as it relates to IMMA’s current programme Desire: A Revision from the 20th Century to the Digital Age; Derek Jarman, PROTEST! and IMMA Archive: 1990s, From the Edge to the Centre.