Politics Of Refusal Research Articles

DIY academic archiving: mischievous disruptions of a new counter-movement

Against increasing injunctions in research governance to create open data, and knee-jerk rejections from qualitative researchers in response to such efforts, we explore a radical counter movement of academics engaged in what we term “DIY Academic Archiving,” the creation of open and accessible archives of their research materials. We turn to interviews with three DIY academic archivists, each drawing on an ethos of community archiving, as opposed to emerging open data schemes: Melissa Munn on The Gaucher/Munn Penal Press Collection,1 Eric Gonzaba’s Wearing Gay History,2 and Michael Goodman’s Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive.3 We see these archives as engaged in a “politics of refusal,” which challenges both conventional methods and ethics in qualitative research as well as new moves toward open data. On the one hand, academics are tasked to “protect” their data by destroying it, under the guise of a supposed mode of “care.” On the other hand, open data makes quite contrary demands, to care for data by making it “open” for further extraction through (re)use. DIY Academic Archiving is a practice of refusal that supports a redirection away from this binary. In this article, we explore how DIY academic archivists play with coding as a form of mischievous disruption, and so are contributing to new data imaginaries. We offer insight into how DIY Academic Archiving supports researchers in their theoretical, methodological and political commitments, and at the same time, how it can enable researchers to take the care-full risk of archiving our research data.

Political Invisibility: Structural Realism and The Kahnawà:ke Mohawk Nation

This research critically examined the intersection of structural realism, normativity, and political invisibility, with a particular focus on its implications for peripheral actors in international relations (IR), exemplified by the Kahnawà:ke Mohawk Nation. Based on the assumption that structural realism governs Western foreign policy, the research investigated the possibility of political invisibility not as an indication of weakness but as a strategic method for political liberation. Through a theoretical analysis that contrasted the normative assumptions of structural realism with critical theory, a qualitative methodology, integrating a critical literature review and a case study analysis were employed in the research in order to dissect the dynamics of political invisibility and its potential as an emancipatory force. The results indicated that political invisibility, when utilised effectively, can function as a subversive instrument enabling marginalised actors such as the Kahnawà:ke Mohawk Nation to maneuver through and capitalise on the normative oversights of structural realism. This subversion challenges conventional IR perspectives by demonstrating how marginalised groups can assert agency and sovereignty despite systemic exclusion from central dialogues and decision-making processes. The scientific novelty of this study lay in its focused critique of structural realism through the lens of political invisibility and the politics of refusal, offering a unique perspective on the agency of peripheral actors in IR. Its practical significance emerges from the potential applications of these insights in fostering a more inclusive and equitable global political discourse, emphasising the strategic potential of invisibility for political mobilisation and emancipation. By positioning political invisibility as a catalyst for emancipatory politics, this research contributed to a broader discourse on power dynamics within IR, challenging established norms and suggesting a paradigm shift towards recognising and leveraging the political agency of marginalised actors.

Reading for refusal in UK maternity care: entangling struggles for border and reproductive justice

Research has shown that women with insecure immigration statuses in the United Kingdom (UK) are more likely to register later in their pregnancy with National Health Service (NHS) maternity care providers. This late engagement with healthcare services is framed in academic debates as one of the key reasons for poor outcomes for these women and their children during and after birth. Interventions, therefore, have focused on how to remove barriers to accessing maternity care for these women. In this paper, we argue that this approach fails to account for the agency of the women adequately, which needs to be understood in the context of state harms and violence towards women with insecure immigration statuses and, in particular, their reproductive lives. We seek to shift these debates by framing this lack of early engagement with state-provided maternity services as a form of refusal that denotes an active disengagement by bordered women from intersecting structures of harm and oppression that are embedded in the UK’s National Health Service, particularly through the charging regime. We argue that the politics of refusal in this case are embedded in struggles not only for border but also reproductive justice. Drawing on participant observation and data from secondary sources, we illustrate how refusal of early antenatal care opens pathways for bordered women to seek the care-ful conditions they need and want during pregnancy.

Pedagogies of Negation

This essay discusses a course I taught in 2021 at the University of Texas at Austin. The course, titled “The Politics of Refusal,” was prompted by my interest in exploring how pain, debility, and suffering, usually understood as limited and passive experiences, might also be generative and disruptive. The essay reflects on the trajectory of the class as the semester progressed. In particular, I pay attention to the dynamics of discussion as they relate to students’ relationship to theory and to disability and care. I consider what worked, what needed rethinking, and what possibilities were opened up for imagining new and creative ways to approach teaching theory during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Speaking for the People: Native Writing and the Question of Political Form

Speaking for the People: Native Writing and the Question of Political Form

'They Just Let Us Rot to Death:' Anti-Colonialism, Contestation, and Resistance to Reparations for Indian Residential School Abuse.

In the wake of increasing attention to reparations for settler colonialism in recent years, the politics of refusal and contestation of reparations has remained an underexplored area in socio-legal research. This article addresses this gap by foregrounding the perspectives of the colonised as a focal point to examine the strategies they mobilise to stage resistance to state-sponsored redress and to expose the harmful logics and legacies of ongoing settler colonialism. Strategies of resistance are discussed in the context of the Independent Assessment Process - a financial compensation process designed to provide redress to survivors of the physical and sexual violence they had suffered while attending Canada's Indian Residential Schools. This article explores how survivors disrupted the compensation process to advance an anti-colonial agenda, to politicise the violence, and to compel the settler state to recognise their lived experiences and realities of structural violence in the settler colonial present.

Becoming Muslim: Converting old and new practices through ‘turning away’

This article focuses on the relationship between religion/secularism and national identity through the experiences of converts to Islam. These men and women occupy a controversial position in society: they are often born and raised in Europe and have chosen for a religion that is generally associated with ‘foreignness’. In this context, converts are often represented in terms of loss, especially in relation to gender relations. In other words, their conversion to Islam is often read as a turning away from modernity or Western lifestyles, rather than a conscious choice for something new, such as spiritual fulfilment. Coulthard and Simpson however, interpret ‘ turning away’ in relation to the politics of recognition and decolonization. This understanding makes it possible to read conversion as an active choice for self-determination. Turning away then becomes a refusal to engage in the hegemonic recognition game of being situated and managed and to be politically consumed by the overarching system. The article will investigate how Dutch converts to Islam negotiate the different aspects of their identities and the boundaries connected to those through a politics of refusal. I will argue that by following Coulthard and Simpson, we can understand converts ‘ turning away’– in an alternative, less negative way. They ‘ turn away’, as Fanon argues, to find freedom on their own terms and in accordance with their own values.

A Double Take on Debt: Reparations Claims and Regimes of Visibility in a Politics of Refusal

A Double Take on Debt: Reparations Claims and Regimes of Visibility in a Politics of Refusal

Artificial intelligence, algorithms, and social inequality: Sociological contributions to contemporary debates

AbstractArtificial intelligence (AI) and algorithmic systems have been criticized for perpetuating bias, unjust discrimination, and contributing to inequality. Artificial intelligence researchers have remained largely oblivious to existing scholarship on social inequality, but a growing number of sociologists are now addressing the social transformations brought about by AI. Where bias is typically presented as an undesirable characteristic that can be removed from AI systems, engaging with social inequality scholarship leads us to consider how these technologies reproduce existing hierarchies and the positive visions we can work towards. I argue that sociologists can help assert agency over new technologies through three kinds of actions: (1) critique and the politics of refusal; (2) fighting inequality through technology; and (3) governance of algorithms. As we become increasingly dependent on AI and automated systems, the dangers of further entrenching or amplifying social inequalities have been well documented, particularly with the growing adoption of these systems by government agencies. However, public policy also presents some opportunities to restructure social dynamics in a positive direction, as long as we can articulate what we are trying to achieve, and are aware of the risks and limitations of utilizing these new technologies to address social problems.

Protesting Precarity: South Korean Workers and the Labor of Refusal

AbstractThis essay examines the crisis of solidarity affecting workers who protest labor precarity under South Korea's capitalist democracy. Once considered foundational to the struggle for national democratization, the dramatic protests of aggrieved workers are frequently depicted as out of place and out of sync. Drawing upon ethnographic research on workers’ protest repertoires, this essay challenges prevailing explanations and instead argues that heightened forms of drama, ritual, and suffering in workers’ protests enact a willful politics of refusal. Moving beyond resistance as an all-encompassing frame, the labor of refusal foregrounds ways of being and becoming that are not rooted in the contractual fallacies of liberal capitalist democracy, but in the spaces of solidarity produced by social movement networks and grassroots communities of care. The labor of refusal may not always generate robust solidarity, but it challenges the structures of organized abandonment that treat workers as disposable under neoliberal capitalist rule.

In This Issue

In This Issue Malcolm Alan Compitello, Executive Editor Emeritus The essays that comprise Volume 26 of the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies embrace a variety of modalities of cultural analysis and subject matter from interpretations of under scrutinized cultural works and original approaches to more canonical ones, to engagement with the relationship between recent forms of cultural diffusion, important social movements, and politics. Spatial and border issues have always been well represented in the pages of this publication. That is certainly the case in Volume 26. Irune Del Rio Gabiola deploys recent work in neocolonial examines how communities combat "geografías extractivistas" or "zonas de no-ser" with peaceful tactics of resistance to achieve social and environmental justice in Honduras. Space, in this case affective mapping, also frames Julia R. Brown's reassessment of the works that Rosario Castellanos sites in Chiapas, Mexico. Professor Brown's spatial analysis of Balún Canán, Ciudad Real, and Oficio de tinieblas argues that Castellanos deploys affective mapping to highlight social inequality in Chiapas. The border has also been central to the scholarship the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies has published. In this issue it is the focus of essays one jointly authored by Claudia Sandberg and Glenda Mejía and the other by Tess Renker. Professors Sandberg and Mejía focus on Diego Quemada-Díaz's first work, La jaula de oro and what it contributes to the growing bibliography on the traumatic effects of those who navigate crossing the border between the United States and Mexico. Professor Renker aligns José María Arguedas's El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo (1971), a critique of inequality with Yuri Herrera's Señales que precederán al final del mundo (2010). His essay proposes that Arguedas novel, which highlights issues of migration, work, and global capitalism, offers an excellent theory and method to interpret recent work that deals with similar issues. The impact of new media is at the center of Daniel Runnels's contribution. It explores how contemporary social resistance movements use a politics of refusal as a form of contesting power. He draws his arguments from social media posts of supporters of Black Lives Matter and the Chilean revuelta, vogueing which the author views as "exercises against state performance of legibility." With the assistance of Luis Buñuel, several of whose most famous films he directed in the early 1960s, the Mexican producer/director Gustavo Alatriste released his adaptation of La casa de Bernarda Alba in 1982. Using archival material, Buñuel's close connection to Lorca [End Page 4] and interviews with one of the film's actors, Braden Clinger offers an assessment of Alatriste's non-canonical interpretation of Lorca's play in a film that has received little attention from scholars. Ramón Gómez de la Serna's vanguardist literary production is fundamentally linked to the tertulia he initiated at the Café Pombo in Madrid. María Soledad Fernández Utrera uncovers an unexplored aspect of the Pombo, its stimulation of what the author labels "sociabilidad anarquista" as a crucible for utopian ideas in Spain before the Spanish Civil War. Like the works of García Lorca and Gómez de la Serna, Horacio Quiroga's fiction is challenging and canonical at the same time. Carlos Abreu Mendoza employs Pierre Boudieu's critique of biography, a study of narrative techniques and recent work on biofiction to scrutinize three recent televised biographical works on Quiroga to challenge common perceptions about the relationship between his fiction and personal life. I have long admired Robert Frost's poem "On Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening." Like the speaking voice in Frost's eloquent poem, I find myself at a point of inflection. Twenty-seven years ago, with the support a dean, a colleague, and a graduate student, I turned a suggestion from David Herzberger into a reality and the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies was born. Dean Chuck Tatum retired some time ago, my colleague Amy Williamsen passed away in a tragic accident, Professor Susan Larson now holds the Qualia Chair at Texas Tech and I retired from full time activity...

Environmental Justice Challenges to International Economic Ordering

The relationship between trade, investment, and environmental protection is complex, and environmental activists have engaged with international economic law in a wide variety of ways. Some environmental activists have sought to use trade systems as leverage to advance environmental protections aims, while others have been concerned about how international economic law constrains unilateral national environmental action. The dominant account of the harmonization of economic and environmental norms and the promotion of sustainable development through trade and investment is challenged by sobering statistics of ecological decline. In the face of intersecting ecological, economic, and social crises facing the global community, the often-marginalized critique developed by environmental justice activists of neoliberal globalization and the legal regimes that enable it is more urgent than ever. These perspectives and voices—which sometimes align with other environmental activists and sometimes directly oppose market-orientated environmental agendas—have been marginalized in the scholarship on international economic law, but offer an indispensable resource for imagining more equitable and ecologically just forms of global economic cooperation. This essay shows how environmental justice activists have enacted a powerful politics of refusal, resisting international economic law as well as articulating visions of how to achieve systemic change and sustainable societies based on environmental, social, economic, and gender justice and peoples’ sovereignty.

Message from the Grassroots

Librarians have responded to the decades-long “serials crisis” with a common narrative and a range of responses that have failed to challenge the ideology and structures that caused it. Using Walter Rodney’s theory of a guerilla intellectual, we critically examine the dominant understanding of this so-called crisis and emphasize the role that capital plays within it. The imperial nature of scholarly journal publishing and some of its many contradictions are discussed. “Transformative” agreements receive special attention as a hyper-capitalist manifestation of these contradictions at the heart of commercial publishing.The politics of refusal are one response to the commercialism, prestige, and power imbalances that drive the academic publishing system. Highlighting the differences between refusal and reform, this paper explores the protagonistic role that librarians can play in a protracted struggle within and beyond the confines of our profession. Select open access efforts are identified at the end as examples of different forms of refusal. This paper is intended to move beyond the traditional discourse of laying blame solely at the feet of the academic publishing oligopoly and also expounds on the bourgeois academy’s use of knowledge production for capital accumulation.

Refusing politics as usual: mapping women of colour’s radical praxis in London and Amsterdam

ABSTRACT This article explores an intriguing emergent organising strategy among women of colour activists in London and Amsterdam: a politics of refusal. In response to the triple catastrophes facing women of colour: the on-going roll back of social welfare states, the normalisation of the far right in everyday life and the xenophobic backlash against migrants, we find that some women of colour activists are deliberatively withdrawing from view and working outside of dominant left activist spaces. Rather than demanding recognition and rights from institutional actors and supposed allies, many activists appeared to welcome and embrace their marginalisation as this exclusion from mainstream life creates the possiblity for alternative ways of doing politics and being political. Drawing on the work of Audra Simpson, we attempt to map the contours of women of colour’s refusal politics and consider how refusal generates different approaches to sovergenity and ungovernability.

At the Margins of Time and Place

At the Margins of Time and Place

North Korean Defectors’ Self-representation as the Politics of Refusal

ABSTRACT While the number of North Korean defectors in South Korea has increased, their portrayal in the mainstream media remains marginal and biased. Given this context, this article explores how North Korean defectors have gradually engaged in self-representation through new media technologies, such as personal broadcasting on digital platforms. In so doing, it reveals that the defectors at least partially challenge the dominant representation or lack of representation of North Koreans and seek self-representation. Drawing on scholarly literature and textual analysis of North Korean defectors’ self-representation through Internet personal broadcasting, this study examines how defectors explore different ways of negotiating the dominant construction of themselves as the other of South Koreans.

The infrastructures of White settler perception: A political phenomenology of colonialism, genocide, ecocide, and emergency

Emergencies are an element of perception. Far from a private and personal affair, perception is social, structured by a process of “inculcation.” Perception has a material-political infrastructure in the sense that it is underlain by cultural and economic conditions that refract the colonial, White supremacist, and heteropatriarchal inscriptions of “dominant” society into the quotidian understanding of events, crystalizing intentional modes in subjects, bodies, and communities. These infrastructures are dynamic and multifaceted, but their alloyed effect regulates phenomena of emergency always to the advantage of the settler colonial state and capitalist interests. Infrastructures of settler perception obfuscate the ways in which Native communities experience environmental emergencies as cycles of settler colonial violence and ecocide. Emergencies such as global warming are described as “human-caused” rather than directly linked to settler colonialism, capitalism, and White supremacy. Many uncritical deployments of the term “Anthropocene” commit a similar fallacy, implicating people who have had little or nothing to do with the planetary ecological collapse. In a White logic of death, or “necropolitics,” the structures of colonialism, genocide, war, and slavery represent not the beginning of crisis, but rather the end of violence and disorder. This strategy of obfuscation is employed in a variety of contexts and seen explicitly in the context of Indian education systems that form a political project of spiritual and physical domination. In response, a politics of refusal has emerged in Native communities to form incommensurable collective experiences of emergencies, attending to the ways in which emergencies reveal the relationships between us and how these indicate differential and yet interconnected responsibilities and moral duties that implicate some of us more than others and call incommensurable communities forth to action each in their own way.

On not seeking asylum: Migrant masculinities and the politics of refusal

Much contemporary research on precarious mobility starts from the perspective that people moving across borders will seek out opportunities for legal protection, if these are available to them. However, this is not always the case, as some migrants who would qualify for asylum or refugee status choose not to seek legal recognition of their status. This paper is an ethnographic exploration of people who refuse to seek asylum. I examine how such refusals are narrated and made sense of from the vantage point of Juba, South Sudan. Taking seriously these refusals as agentive decisions, the paper explores how men who have the informational and material resources to chart paths that bypass juridical protection narrate refusal through their own grammars of masculinity. Thinking with refusal is generative in two important ways. First, refusal refocuses attention away from the specificities of particular power geometries and towards the underlying juridical orders and assumptions on which these geometries rely. Second, refusal offers a window into the social constellation and relations in which such migrants actively invest. Building on work that explores the intersection between masculinity and mobility, I show how gendered ideologies shape not just the decision to embark on a new migration project, but also inform how migrants evaluate the legal status-destination dyad as they plot their futures.

“An Inside Thing to Live by”: Refusal, Conjure, and Black Feminist Imaginaries among Granny Midwives

Abstract“Granny midwives” often based their authority to practice midwifery on the spiritual traditions of rootwork or conjure passed down by the foremothers who trained them. However, granny midwives were compelled to give up their conjure-infused methods of birthing if they wanted to become licensed (that is, to get a “permit”) or be authorized by the state to continue their practice of midwifery. In response, some granny midwives refused to recognize the authority of the state in the birthing realm, willfully retaining rootwork in their birthing practices. In this article, I contrast the response of granny midwives, a politics of refusal, with another major tradition in African American thought, a politics of recognition, such as gaining citizenship and rights, permits, and licenses from the state. Due to the political stakes of the granny midwife's conflict with the state, I argue that black feminists often endow the figure of the granny midwife (or more broadly, the conjure woman) with the political significance of refusal in our emancipatory imaginaries. To demonstrate this, I will analyze the interventions in black liberation politics that two black feminist writers make through their invocation of granny midwives: Zora Neale Hurston's essay, “High John de Conquer,” and Toni Morrison's novel, Paradise.

The politics of refusal and opacity in an Urban South

The politics of refusal and opacity in an Urban South