Sara Ahmed, 'No! The Art and Activism of Complaining'

The Department of Drama in the School of the Arts at Queen Mary University of London is honoured to announce the Annual Catherine Silverstone Lecture.

The lecture will be presented by Sara Ahmed and will launch Drama's annual Peopling the Palaces Festival of live art and performance. The 2025 Peopling the Palaces Festival theme is Resistance.

Attendance is FREE. All welcome.

The in-person event will take place in the Arts Two Lecture Theatre on the Mile End campus at Queen Mary University of London. The venue is accessible. The event will be followed by a wine reception.

Please arrive for 6:45pm (BST). The lecture commences at 7pm sharp (BST). We recommend you access campus from the Mile End Road between Arts One and the Law Building. A detailed campus map is here: https://www.qmul.ac.uk/about/howtofindus/mileend/

Note that we slightly overbook to cover no-shows, so admission will be first come first served for those registered on the night (though we do not anticipate being unable to accommodate everyone who is registered and attends).

‘No! The Art and Activism of Complaining’

Sara Ahmed

A complaint is how we say no, how we refuse to acquiesce to a situation. We might say no to a harasser and to the institution that enables harassment. But saying no within an institution, or to one, is no simple matter. It often leads to being shut out or shut down. In this lecture, I explore how no is a small word with a lot of work to do; or how we have a lot of work to do to keep it going. Even when a no shuts a door, that no can be passed down and picked up by others. A no can be how we clarify our projects and find our people. I will be drawing on my forthcoming book, No is Not a Lonely Utterance: The Art and Activism of Complaining.

About Sara Ahmed

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. Her most recent book is The Feminist Killjoy Handbook (Allen Unwin, 2023). Previous books include Complaint! (2021), What's The Use? On the Uses of Use (2019) and Living a Feminist Life (2017), all published by Duke University Press. She has just completed a new book, No Is Not a Lonely Utterance: The Art and Activism of Complaining, which is coming out with Allen Unwin later this year. She blogs at feministkilljoys.com and has a newsletter https://feministkilljoys.substack.com/. You can also find her on bluesky @saranahmed.bsky.social and instagram @feministkilljoyatwork

About the Peopling the Palaces Festival 2025

Further planning for the Peopling the Palaces Festival 2025 is in progress. Please check back later for more information.

About the Annual Catherine Silverstone Lecture

Those of us who had the pleasure to work with Catherine knew her to be an intuitive thinker, a brilliant doctoral supervisor, a generous, warm, and committed teacher, and a bold leader, notably in her tenure as Head of the School of English and Drama at QMUL. Catherine was a highly regarded scholar of contemporary queer and decolonial studies, including in Māori performance of Shakespeare in Aotearoa New Zealand, the films of Derek Jarman, and LGBTQIA culture broadly, including in relation to club performance, queer adolescence, and performances of queer affirmation and remembrance, trauma and death. This named lecture honours and celebrates Catherine’s legacy by inviting a speaker to present research that is distinguished for its reflection of some of the characteristics of Catherine’s own research: rigorous, passionate, and intellectually searching in its attention to theatre and performance; elegant in its interdisciplinarity; committed to challenging the authority of the canon, whether by disturbing the influence of historical texts and authorships or by trafficking seemingly ‘illegitimate’ objects and practices into scholarship; and robustly inclusive in its concern for feminist, queer, trans, Indigenous, Black and Brown scholarship and practices, including in the Global South.

Photos of Catherine Silverstone courtesy of People's Palace Projects