Sara Ahmed is Professor in Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research is concerned with how bodies and worlds take shape; and how power is secured and challenged in everyday life worlds, as well as institutional cultures.

Currently she is working on a new book project on the ‘sociality of the will’ in which she aims to explore the relationship between willfulness (as an attribution and as the experience of an attribution) and social dissent. She is also working on a book that brings together the research findings on diversity in higher education (which explores the relationship between new equality regimes and institutional racism) with a set of reflections on what it means to “embody diversity” entitled, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. In this book she develops her argument that diversity and equality have become performance indicators and that they function as ‘non-performatives’ (they do not bring about the effects that they name).

Some of her more recent publications include:

Books

• (forthcoming) The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke University Press.
• (2006). Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press.

Articles

• (forthcoming). ‘Killing Joy: Feminism and the History of Happiness,” Signs
• (2009). ‘Happiness and Queer Politics,’ World  Picture 3, http://www.worldpicturejournal.com/
• (2009). ‘Embodying Diversity: Problems and Paradoxes for Black feminists’. Race Ethnicity and Education. Special issue on ‘Black Feminisms and Postcolonial Paradigms: Researching Educational Inequalities’, edited by Cynthia Josepth and Heidi Mirza. 12, 1: 41-52.
• (2008). ‘The Politics of Good Feeling’, Australasian Journal of Critical Race and Whiteness Studies. 4, 1.
• (2008). ‘Sociable Happiness’, Emotion, Space and Society. 1: 10-13.
• (2008). ‘Multiculturalism and the Promise of Happiness’, New Formations, 63: 121-137.
• (2008). ‘Imaginary Prohibitions: Some Preliminary Remarks on the Founding Gestures of the New Materialism’, European Journal of Women’s Studies, 15: 23-39.

Book chapters

• (forthcoming). 'Creating Disturbance: Feminism, Happiness and Affective Differences’ in Marianne Liljeström and Susanna Paasonen (eds). Working with Affect in Feminist Readings: Disturbing Differences. London: Routledge.
• (forthcoming). 'Commitment as a Non-Performative' in Begüm Özden Firat, Sarah De Mul, Sonja van Wichelen (eds.). Commitment and Complicity in Cultural Theory and Practice, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
• (forthcoming). 'Happy Objects' in M. Gregg and G.Seigworth (eds.), The Affect Reader, Durham, N. Carolina: Duke University Press.
• (forthcoming). 'Orientations Matter' in S. Holland and D.Coole (eds). Materialism and Subjectivity, Durham, N. Carolina: Duke University Press.
• (forthcoming). 'The Organisation of Hate’ in Jennifer Harding and Deidre Pribram (ed). Emotions: A Cultural Studies Reader. London: Routledge. [reprint]
• (2007). 'Declarations of Whiteness: The Non-Performativity of Anti-Racism' in Damien Riggs (ed), Taking up the challenge: Critical race and whiteness studies in a postcolonising nation, Adelaide: Crawford House Publishers [reprint].