Sara Ahmed

Ahmed was based at the Institute for Women’s Studies at Lancaster University from 1994 to 2004, and is one of its former directors. She was appointed to the Department of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths College, University of London in 2004, and was the inaugural director of its Centre for Feminist Research, which was set up 'to consolidate Goldsmiths' feminist histories and to help shape feminist futures at Goldsmiths.' In spring 2009 Ahmed was the Laurie New Jersey Chair in Women’s Studies at Rutgers University and in Lent 2013 she was the Diane Middlebrook and Carl Djerassi Professor in Gender Studies at Cambridge University, where she conducted research on "Willful Women: Feminism and a History of Will". In 2015 she was the keynote speaker at the National Women's Studies Association annual conference. In 2016 Ahmed resigned from her post at Goldsmiths in protest over the alleged sexual harassment of students by staff there. She has indicated that she will continue her work as an independent scholar. She blogs at feministkilljoys, a project she continues to update. The blog is a companion to her book "Living a Feminist Life" (2017) that enables her to reach people; posts become chapters and the book becomes blogging material. The term "feminist killjoy" "became a communication device, a way of reaching people who recognized in her something of their own experience."

Diversity work is one of Ahmed’s common topics. Included in many of her works, including Living a Feminist Life and On Being Included, it is a concept that makes tangible what it means to live a feminist life day to day in institutions. To Ahmed, diversity work is "[learning] about the techniques of power in the effort to transform institutional norms or in an effort to be in a world that does not accommodate our being." Diversity work is not any one thing. It is the act of trying to change an institution, and also simply the act of existing in one when it was not meant for you. She draws upon her experiences as a woman of color in academia and the works of others, including Chandra Talpade Mohanty, M. Jacqui Alexander, and Heidi Mirza.

2019, Ahmed was awarded an honorary doctorate from Malmö University, Sweden. She gave a lecture, "Feminists at Work: Diversity, Complaint, Institutions" as honorary doctor.

Published in 2019 by Duke University Press. Ahmed gives the historical idea on the association of use with life and strength in the 19th century and how utilitarianism helped shape individuals through useful ends. She also explores how use comes with restricted spaces. Ahmed then explores the ideas for queer use.

2017, Ahmed received the Kessler Award for contributions to the field of LBGTQ studies from CLAGS, CUNY. Ahmed gave a talk, "Queer Use," when accepting this award.

Published in 2017 by Duke University Press. Ahmed's blog, "feministkilljoys", was written at the same time as "Living a Feminist Life" (2017). As the title suggests, Ahmed explores feminist theory, and what it means on our everyday lives. One way this manifests is in diversity work, something to which she dedicated a third of the book. She also spends much of the book exploring the feminist killjoy, the feminist in action who takes up the call in their everyday life.

Published by Duke University Press in 2014. Ahmed focuses on the idea of willfulness as resistance. She adds that willfulness involves persistence in having been brought down. Ahmed's goal throughout this book was to "spill the container" as willfulness provides a container for perversion.

Published in 2012 by Duke University Press. In On Being Included, Ahmed "offers an account of the diversity world". She explores institutional racism and whiteness, and the difficulties diversity workers face in trying to overcome them in their institutions.

Published in 2010 by Duke University Press. This work was awarded the FWSA book prize in 2011 for "ingenuity and scholarship in the fields of feminism, gender or women’s studies". In this book, Ahmed focuses on what it means to be worthy of happiness and how specific acts of deviation work with particular identities to cause unhappiness. She also focuses on how happiness is narrated and the idea of utilitarianism.

Published in 2006 by Duke University Press. Ahmed often focuses on the subject of orientation and being orientated in space, especially in relationship to sexual orientation. In her book Queer Phenomenology: Orientation, Objects, Others Ahmed states that orientation refers to the objects and others that we turn to face as well as the space that we inhabit, and how it is that we inhabit that space. Ahmed brings together queer phenomenology as a way of conveying that orientation is situated in the lived experience.

Published in 2004 (with a second edition in 2014) by Edinburgh University Press.

Published in 1998 by Cambridge University Press. Ahmed's main focus in this book revolves around the question "is or should feminism be modern or postmodern?" She reflects on what she feels postmodernism is doing to the world in different contexts.

Ahmed was born in Salford, England. She has a Pakistani father and English mother, and emigrated to Adelaide, Australia, with her family in the early 1970s. Key themes in her work, such as migration, orientation, difference, strangerness, and mixed identities, relate directly to some of these early experiences. She completed her first degree at Adelaide University and doctoral research at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, Cardiff University. She now lives in the outskirts of Cambridge with her partner, Sarah Franklin, who is an academic at the University of Cambridge.

Sara Ahmed (30 August 1969) is a British-Australian scholar whose area of study includes the intersection of feminist theory, lesbian feminism, queer theory, critical race theory and postcolonialism.