Broken Record

A landmark volume documenting the scope and insidiousness of gendered abuse in academia, revealing the limits of institutional redress, and sharing hard-won strategies for change.

Broken Record brings together narratives of gendered abuse in academia from across disciplines, at every career stage, around the United States and the world. Individually and collectively, contributors describe harrowing experiences of bullying, mobbing, harassment, and assault in a range of institutional spaces, including classrooms, offices, library stacks, conferences, interviews, and out on field research. Their abusers are teachers, mentors, students, colleagues, chairs, administrators, and even representatives of the very offices tasked with protecting them. Beyond using storytelling to expose the ubiquity of abuse, these writers also theorize its causes and proffer strategies for resistance and healing. With an afterword by Sara Ahmed, author of the groundbreaking Complaint!, Broken Record forms its own powerful collective-a chorus of nearly fifty academics with highly varied yet strikingly consistent narratives, united in a clarion call for change.

"Sharing our stories of complaint matters even when, or perhaps because, we have shared these stories many times before … The message is hopeful and hard. Yes: there is still so much work to do. Yes: we have to keep saying it because they keep doing it. Yes: the need to repeat ourselves can be tiring, frustrating. That is why we need to say it more and for more to say it." — Sara Ahmed, from the afterword

"As the editors hope and intend, this volume functions as a complaint collective. In their specificity and range, the essays cast light on many corners of academe, elucidating patterns of harassment and the blocking of efforts to prevent or redress harm. Although the essays document diabolically successful campaigns to isolate women academics and demonstrate the fragile bonds that hold whistleblowers together, the volume also provides the context necessary to understand the pervasiveness and nuances of harassment, as well as the processes that leave those who complain open to doubt and discrediting." — Leigh Gilmore, author of The #MeToo Effect: What Happens When We Believe Women