Microrefusal Archive
24 Jun 2025: I’ve just finished a whirlwind lineup of three conferences in two weeks, the Association for Interdisciplinary Studies conference in Oulu, the Deleuze and Guattari Studies conference in Stockholm, and the International Critical Management Studies conference in Manchester. My conclusion is there are far more of us who are working to push boundaries, embrace the art of research, challenge colonial frames and forms, and interrogate our academic inheritances than the ‘establishment’ structures want to allow for. Yet, even with our critical and decolonially-aspirational values, we consistently find ourselves defaulting, as teachers, writers, reviewers, and editors, to structures we’d rather not endorse. So, what now? What next? What does critical mass in higher education transgression and transformation look like?
Here, at the summer solstice (midsummer, in Finland), we mark the longest days of the phase of midnight sun and begin to turn our attention again towards the coming increase of the night. Bio-mythologically speaking, night contains within it the possibility of growth-in-darkness, rest, reflection, hauntings, and other un-visible transformations. It is here at this turn that I would like to launch a little thought project in the name of microrefusals, a weekly engagement with the ways I and my friends and colleagues approach the praxis of refusing the structures of academia that dampen our creative potential in a world that desperately needs more creativity. This incipient catalogue of microrefusals sits in the generative sphere of feminist poethics (inspired by the Black feminist poethics of Alexis Pauline Gumbs in her Undrowned chapter on refusal, bell hooks on educational transgression and love, and Angela Davis on the social transformations ushered in by classic Blues artists, among others), Eve Tuck’s approach to desire as “a thirding of the dichotomized categories of reproduction and resistance” (2009, Suspending Damage) with many others similarly oriented from across diverse Indigenous traditions, and the ongoing critical work that hides in the between places of our ‘standard’ disciplines, much of which is, itself, inspired by grassroots activism worldwide. These sites of refusal reflect work that imagines otherwise, towards expansive, planetary-scale love and justice. Refusal, as a mode of praxis that works to bring into being that which is not yet, but could be if we give it space and time to emerge. Refusal, as an effort to embrace epistemologies other than the petulant dialectics of stance-counterstance that formulate so much of neoliberal academia.
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Week 1 Microrefusal: Midsummer
Monday 23 June 2025
Sunrise: 02:19, Sunset: 0:21 tomorrow (Oulu)
At the International Critical Management Studies conference last week, we spent the first day of the conference in residence at Manchester’s Hulme Community Garden Centre, a venue dedicated to urban green space cultivation, community engagement, and environmental education. There were no outlets, no screens, no slide decks for our opening sessions. It was thoroughly un-electric, and yet, electrifying, and we carried this experience with us throughout the remaining days of the conference. In the more traditionally academic setting of Manchester Metropolitan University, with an abundance of screens, buzzing fluorescent lights, lecterns and other architectures of dominance, it occurred to me that the gardens infused the entire conference with a sense of unexpected familiarity that the green space encouraged.