Epistemic Room: The Role of Refusal in Collaborative Community-Based Research

• In Event: 60.059 - Ethical and Epistemic Intersections in Collaborative Community-Based Research: Challenges for Field Building

Abstract

Epistemic Room: The Role of Refusal in Collaborative Community-based Research

Objectives
This paper will discuss the important ethical and epistemic role of refusal in collaborative community-based research. The paper will define refusal as a research stance that helps educational researchers and other social scientists, as well as collaborating communities decide what can be known, asked, shared, circulated, and reconfigured as data in academe. Authors will focus specifically on refusal in the analysis of community-based research. The objectives of this paper are to determine 1) what kinds of data or stories may require an ethic of refusal in collaborative community-based research 2) what epistemic possibilities emerge when refusal is engaged not just as a no, but as a generative stance, and 3) how communities might enact refusals of the expansion of the knowledge territory of the academy.

Theoretical framework
This paper draws from recent work in Indigenous political thought and decolonizing theory. The paper builds upon Audra Simpson’s (2007) articulation of refusals in ethnographic research not as subtractive, but as theoretically generative. Refusal is not a flat no, but a redirection to ideas and possibilities otherwise unacknowledged or unconsidered (Tuck & Yang, 2014), and a recognition of other, distinct, epistemic worlds beyond the social scientific. Refusal regards limits on the circulation of certain kinds of knowledge as both ethical and epistemically productive. Further, this paper considers the imperatives of research analysis approaches which go beyond coding and categorizing (St. Pierre, 2013; St. Pierre & Jackson, 2014).

Modes of inquiry
This paper will use examples of refusal from art, literature, and collaborative analyses of interview data, attending to implications for collaborative community-based educational research. In particular, authors will engage the “Erased lynchings” series by Ken Gonzalez-Day (n.d.) and Kara Walker’s (2014) “A subtlety” to think about epistemic violence and performances of refusal. Authors will also discuss their collaborations with communities to establish epistemic boundaries in data analysis.

Materials
Materials discussed in this paper include examples of refusal in research and media (Simpson, 2007; Falcondaily, 2011; Gonzalez-Day, n.d.; Shakya, 2011). Additional materials include accounts of refusals during data analysis with community researchers and other collaborative projects.

Conclusions
Collaborative community-based research can generate and uncover knowledge that is useful to communities who have otherwise been disenfranchised and mistreated by academic researchers. However, this knowledge may need to be put in balance with sometimes competing needs to refuse to transmit this knowledge to a wider or academic audience.

Scholarly significance
Refusal, or putting limits on what can be known and shared by and with academic researchers may provoke alarm in researchers who do not recognize the links between academic knowledge production and settler colonialism (see Tuck & Yang, 2014; Simpson, 2007). Yet, refusal is both an ethical and epistemically productive stance for collaborative community-based research.

Authors

• Eve Tuck, University of Toronto

• K. Wayne Yang, University of California - San Diego