Complaint as disobedience: a creative method

This paper considers complaint not as an administrative procedure but as a creative method—something that can be staged, performed and co-sensed with others. Adapted from a performance lecture first delivered at the ACUADS 2025 Conference, held under the theme disobedience, the paper draws on Sara Ahmed’s Complaint! (2021) to think through complaint as a form of disobedience, particularly for women of colour racialised into scripts of subservience and compliance within cultural and higher education institutions. Rather than offering a resolved theory of complaint, we present three creative tactics developed, borrowed and improvised across our collective practice—eating together, reading together and workshopping together—as counter-institutional methods for redistributing the risk of complaint and making structural harm visible. We close by returning to the provocation that animated the original performance: what does an institution owe the disobedience it invites?