Radical understanding: reflections on knowledge production, power, positionality, and practices of refusal within academic research

Abstract

By looking at scholarly research as well as my own experience of practicing refusal in my research and documentary work, this article focuses on how refusal practices can challenge dominant methods of knowledge production and lead to what I want to conceptualize in this paper as radical understanding; a way of practicing and relating to research otherwise. I propose radical understanding as methodological and epistemological tool to contest the imperialist and capitalist -dominant machinery of knowledge production.