is a practical feminist. This is not to say that she's not a serious, creative, or challenging feminist. She's all those things. But, like bell hooks, Brittany Cooper, and others, Ahmed takes often abstruse feminist theory and makes it accessible to non-academic readers. Her work offers a thinking person's guide to living a feminist life. She understands that creating social change means getting transformative ideas to the widest audience possible. As well as writing for a broad audience, Ahmed is a prominent voice in efforts to reform British educational institutions. Most recently, frustrated by the University of London's inaction on issues of sexual harassment and sexual misconduct, she resigned in protest from a secure academic position at Goldsmiths College (a constituent college of the University of London)-a high profile resignation that dramatically drew attention to a seemingly insoluble problem. Her most recent book, What's the Use: On the uses of use (2019) elegantly attempts to understand the intractability of the university to become safer and more diverse. Ahmed's accessibility and activism come together in What's the Use. With What's the Use? Ahmed completes a trilogy that began with The Promise of Happiness (2010) and continued with Willful Subjects (2014). As in the first two books, Ahmed's method is to 'follow words around.' Use, of course, is more grounded, less abstract than happiness or will and comes with a long literary and philosophical history. One of the delights of What's the Use comes from following the word use on a journey that ranges from Lucretius to Virginia Woolf, from John Locke to George Eliot, then takes a deep dive into utilitarian thinkers like Henry Sidgwick, John Stuart Mill, and Jeremy Bentham (a founder of the University of London). While Audre Lorde famously cautioned us that the master's tools cannot dismantle the master's house, Ahmed gracefully uses Western philosophical thought to help build her case for diversity in the university and the queerness of use. Another, more fanciful part of Ahmed's method is her use of metaphors. Take, for example, the traditional bright red British post box-an object whose use could not be clearer. But, when nesting birds take up residence in a box and a sign appears on the box, 'Birds nesting. Please do not use this box. Many thanks,' the box has been re-purposed. Its use is in no way less essential than its original purpose but could hardly have been anticipated by the builders of the box. Similarly, in an example drawn from literature, George Eliot 's character Silas Marner values his brown earthenware pot for its many uses, some of which he and the pot's maker hardly anticipated. Not surprisingly, along with methodology, utilitarian thought, the ideas of Bentham in particular, centres Ahmed's book. She pays particular attention to utilitarian educational projects such as nineteenth-century monitorial schools, as well as the links of utilitarianism with the modern university. For Ahmed, utilitarianism is a future, I would most like...
