Microrefusal Archive
24 June 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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Weeks 13-16: Academic Consent
Monday 15 September 2025
Sunrise: 6.40, Sunset: 19.45 (Oulu)
Monday 22 September 2025
Sunrise: 7.01, Sunset: 19.19 (Oulu)
Monday 29 September 2025
Sunrise: 7.22, Sunset: 18.53 (Oulu)
Monday 6 October 2025
Sunrise: 7.43, Sunset: 18.28 (Oulu)
I’ve been sitting on these microrefusals for several weeks, as various educational experiences of learning and teaching have been demanding attention at the forefront of my consciousness. These four microrefusals form a series of practices related to academic consent, and while represented here in abstraction, speak to real-time quandaries in higher education settings.
One of the aspects of neoliberal educational practice that sustains unjust systems is the tacit agreement that once one agrees to participate in an educational experience, one is entirely bound by the conditions defined at the outset of that experience. In eurocentric educational hierarchies, we are trained to see the conditions of an educational experience as static, externally-defined, and beyond our control. Embedded structures reinforce this continually: poorly-designed assignments still must be completed; bad lectures still must be attended; transcripts carry course failures with various codes that communicate to external sources (often with the power to determine the next opportunities available to the transcript holder) that the person receiving the grade is the one who has failed. Once we enroll in a named academic experience, the system tells us that we have granted consent to be bound to the conditions of that experience without further question. Change does not belong to the person consenting to receive the benefits of the experience. However, aspects of these systems do change, over time; perhaps there are ways to push that change forward with intention, whenever we are positioned to take on the risks that accompany the work of challenging the manner in which we consent to aspects of the experience that are unethical.
Continuous consent
In sex education curriculum that emphasizes healthy sexuality, consent is understood as something continuous — it is not enough to consent once; it must be revised and updated continually, for each event, each new practice, each change in emotional or physical state. Consent can be withdrawn at any time, without consequence. I wonder what might change in educational power structures if we were to approach educational experiences as though consent can be withdrawn at any time without consequence, rather than expected of us as a permanent condition of the experience.
2. Consent to be taught
Sometimes it takes a while to realize that a teacher’s values are incompatible with one’s own. While encountering value difference might be considered a necessary part of education, it becomes problematic when power is unidirectional and unequal. When a teacher’s values define the interpretation of what is worth knowing as a closed system, the student’s values are overwritten. Why do our systems permit this overwriting, and sustain it through retaliatory practices (such as evaluation structures defined according to whether the student’s work is aligned with the teacher’s values). What would it mean to adjust our systems to allow for withdrawal of our consent to be taught at any point in the process, without consequence?
3. Consent to receive feedback
Not all feedback is useful, valuable, or offered with good intentions. Not all feedback is about the person receiving it — sometimes (often?) it is more about the emotional needs of the person giving it. Not all feedback deserves to be considered as a basis for behavioral change by the person receiving it. Some possbilities for alternative responses might include: “This feedback is not useful to me.” “This feedback is not consistent with my values.” “This feedback is not offered in good faith.” “I am not seeking feedback in this context.” “I don’t consent to this feedback.” (In a research context, this might look more like: “This feedback indicates that Reviewer 2 has not carefully read my draft, and thus I will not take time to respond to questions that are already clearly addressed in what I have submitted.” “This feedback indicates that Reviewer 2 is ideologically opposed to my chosen methodology, which I remain committed to, thus the comments are not relevant to my submission.” Etc.)
4. Consent to be evaluated
Questions we are not trained to ask in educational hierarchies include: “Is this person qualified to evaluate me?” “What are the conditions of those qualifications?” “”Is this person evaluating me in good faith?” If an honest assessment indicates that the person evaluating is not qualified, we might consider resisting tacit acceptance of the evaluation paradigm. We might consider openly challenging the evaluation structures. We might consider asking the evaluator to defend their methods of evaluation. We might decide to not submit the assignment. We might submit a different assignment. Etc. (In research, when article revisions indicate unqualified evaluators: we might consider withdrawing the paper. We might consider looking for a different journal. We might consider writing to the managing editors. We might consider challenging the content of problematic reviews in responses to their comments. We might consider whether the feedback warrants a performative “thank you for this valuable feedback”, rather than offering this phrase pro forma. Etc.)
In all of these areas of intervention, there is risk in expressing or demanding a continuous-consent approach to the assumption of institutionalized single-use consent at the outset of an experience. The embedded hierarchies and their policies protect against these challenges, and there are often real consequences to challenging them. But, as in most things I’ve been discussing in this microrefusal project, when we find ourselves positioned to take on the risk, others in the system may also benefit from our modeling of alternative approaches to neoliberal-colonial dominance practices embedded in our educational practices.
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Week 12: The News, Part II
Monday 8 September 2025
Sunrise: 06.19, Sunset: 20.11 (Oulu)
This week, in contrast to last week’s ritual of avoidance, I’m going to dig deep into the scenes behind the news, and beyond the clickbait headlines. I’m going to read everything I can find about current events in places that are not getting the attention they deserve in the Eurocentric press. I’m going to find new-to-me stories, and explore textiles, poems, songs, and other artworks from places burdened by present injustices, to see what artists have to say about their histories, what epistemologies their linguistic musical, and spiritual contributions offer against Eurocentric-dominant norms and propaganda I may have previously digested. I’m going to look into what is happening in grassroots activism in underrecognized global violences, and see whether any of that work is attended to in the Eurocentric circles my work moves within. I’m going to ask what it means to hold the expansive stories of the people beyond the headlines in me as I build towards a more just and generative research milieu. I’m starting here, with the crisis watch conflict tracker, and here and here, with the UNESCO world heritage lists (while also recognizing inherent challenges in the UN framework).
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Week 11: The News
Monday 1 September 2025
Sunrise: 5.58, Sunset: 20:37 (Oulu)
It was a bad week for the United States. (Every week since January 20 has been a bad week for the United States, as well as many weeks/years/centuries before that second inauguration of the excesses of late stage fascist übercapitalism). This week, for some reason, felt especially heavy to me. Maybe it was the ICE raids on firefighters in Pacific Northwest, the recapture of Ábrego García, the article suggesting a much-higher-than-previously-assumed likelihood of the collapse of the Atlantic Current, more dead children in the US by the guns we refuse to regulate (and the feeling that we are all expected to have already resigned ourselves to this), more dead children in Gaza and Sudan (and the feeling that we are all expected to have already resigned ourselves to this), the University of Chicago suspending PhD admissions in the Humanities, Middlebury College closing the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, the CDC resignations, the photo of European leaders standing in the Narcissist-in-Chief’s swag cabinet with printed hats that say “Tr**p 2028”. Maybe it was looking at all of these headlines and thinking, “this circus is relentless.”
This week’s refusal is one of privilege, but nonetheless undertaken with the hope that it will help sustain the work ahead. I’m taking a week’s vacation from the news. This grates against the core of my identity as someone raised by a major newspaper copy chief and journalism professor, and against my sense that we have a responsibility as humans to witness, to learn, and to look into the voids that our systems create and try to fill them with something better. I know that the news is happening whether I read it or not, and I know that the fact that some (but not most) of us can choose to look away is part of the horror. I also recognize that the depression that this flood-the-zone technique wants me to feel is fed by a 24-hour news cycle that sustains paralysis, keeping me scrolling instead of doing. I need a bit of space to re-ground what the ‘doing’ needs from me.
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Week 10: AI, Part II
Monday 25 August 2025
Sunrise: 5.36, Sunset: 21.02 (Oulu)
Out of curiosity, after months of annoyance when Acrobat asks me every time I open a document if I want it summarized, I fed one of my own article-planning slide decks into Adobe’s AI summary tool. It was, for the most part, terrifyingly accurate, and I’m not sure how I feel about that except that it is a wildly unsettling feeling deep in my core. However, the bot’s conclusion was that the slide deck “suggests that while more research is needed, actionable ideas can be derived from the current study.” This part is the most terrifying at all. Nowhere in my writing was there any reference to future research, a need for future research, or the study’s positioning for future contributions. It’s not a part of the internal workings of what was, for me, a planning exercise. Notably, I detest the phrase “more research is needed” and do not consider my research according to how it aligns with or suggests this clause. Also notably, it is very difficult these days to find any article or proposal that does not use this phrase somewhere. Additionally, the term “actionable”, used in this way, is dripping with neoliberal irony, and is inappropriate to my study on decolonization praxis in neoliberal contexts. This conclusion tells me that AI is culling its “summaries” of single documents from the vast cache of what is ‘out there’, in addition to whatever is intrinsic to the work itself. Our formal structures are limiting enough, as we face realities that require a fundamental reframing of standard patterns of practice. If we rely too heavily on tools such as AI summaries, the tools themselves will have an outsized impact on what we are permitted to imagine. AI doesn’t just have identity bias (which is enough of a reason itself to be wary); it also appears to have structural bias. Thus, I am really struggling to find a reason to justify ANY use of AI in the research process that will do anything to actually enhance the potential of generative research creation. I’ve seen a few things recently about “using AI differently”, so I will continue to try to keep a tiny crack of my mind open to this possibility, but right now I’m not feeling particularly sanguine about the prospects. And I won’t be using Adobe’s bot for reading article summaries any time soon.
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Week 9: AI, Part I
Monday, 18 August 2025
Sunrise: 05.13, Sunset: 21.28 (Oulu)
I’m not going to any more events, required or otherwise, about some AI-themed “quandary” that limits - often by false binaries in catchy title language - access to the deeper existential quandaries of this world-shaking and potentially apocalyptic phenomenon.
Week 8: Politics of Compilation
Monday, 11 August 2025
Sunrise: 04.49, Sunset: 21.55 (Oulu)
I am refusing the rising dominance of the compilation thesis, and in particular, the Finnish trend towards reducing the number of articles that are required to complete it. There are (unexamined?) values hiding inside of this trend that I wish were much more present in the conversations.
Is education solely of value when it increases the productivity of a society?
Is the purpose of a university to support economic growth and development?
Is economic growth commensurate with concepts of social improvement?
Is the product of the degree more important than the process of working towards it?
Is simplicity and distillation a critical aspect of every research trajectory?
Should a research question be phrased such that there is a clear path to an answer?
Is a “research question” the only way to design a study?
(And so on…)
My answer to each of these questions is, “no”. And there is not currently a lot of room for these “no”s in contemporary Eurocentric higher education.
There are plenty of examples of wonderful compilation theses, and for work that fits well into articles, it may be an ideal form. Alongside this potential, however, there are also (neoliberal) gains to be had, both institutionally and personally, in this approach to doctoral training, and not everyone who might want refuse the compilation is in a position to do so. Life conditions, responsibilities, and future goals and needs often support a person’s choice to align with these rising trends, and one’s work may have significant social value regardless of the mode in which the doctoral research is expressed. Nevertheless, in my choice of a monograph, I’m finding that the assumptions of the value of speed, completion, compartmentalization, single-line clarity of purpose, publication counts, and “just get it out of the way to get to the real work” justifications that often come to the fore in a compilation thesis are so pervasive that it is often difficult to be taken seriously when I claim an alternative set of values. More often than not, my interest in exploring the rigor of process and maintaining a commitment to slow research is framed as iconoclastic or naive. So be it.
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Week 7 Microrefusal: Boundaries of the Possible
Monday 4 August 2025
Sunrise: 4.26, Sunset: 22.19 (Oulu)
I have been organizing a mess of files hiding in a Dropbox “Deal With Me Later” folder that includes several years’ worth of desktop-clearing chaos. I found a file titled “Ancient Notes on PhD Proposals.” Best I can tell, “Ancient” means “written sometime before 2021 when I threw this doc in a folder for later organizing,” which was also several years before I applied to a PhD program at the University of Oulu, in a country that, at the time of scribbling those notes, was most certainly not on my radar as a place I might someday live. I must have met with someone, a professor from somewhere, about ideas I had. I don’t remember doing this, but there is reference to “our program” in my notes. Scribbled in the margins were some names: Fanon, Wynter, Foucault, Tuck, Frankfurt School. Foucault was the only one of those names I’d heard of, and it had been awhile since I had tried to read him. I was not, at that point, aware that there were entire theoretical fields dedicated to critical and decolonial theory. And yet, someone saw those thinkers in me before I knew they existed. At that stage, I was most likely writing, thinking, and talking about global music, working overtime for whatever school I was aligned with at that moment. I did not have time to look the names up, and filed the notes away, “for later.” Our state of openness is a critical element of receiving formative ideas, and we are not always ready for them. I don’t know that I would have had the stamina for Wynter in that pre-pandemic era of my life, or the emotional vocabulary for Tuck. Now, their words are seminal to the choices I make in my own writing. This (ongoing) realization is an important part of my teaching practice, especially in contexts such as “decolonial and intersectional feminism” (a lead-heavy name for a course I love to teach). We are ready when we are ready. The challenge is how to push up against the boundary of the possible and increase our tolerance for readiness without breaking from the effort. The microrefusal here, I suppose, is to honor that process, each time it presences.
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Week 6 Microrefusal: Traces of Hegemony (I)
Monday 28 July
Sunrise: 04.02, Sunset: 22.45 (Oulu)
I’ve spent the last few weeks working on an essay for the Bread Loaf School of English, focusing on lens shifting that attempts to create alternatives to the “overrepresentation of [White, Cis, Western, Christian, etc.] Man” that Sylvia Wynter speaks to. The essay revisits the idea of the Lyric ‘I’ across the English lyric canon through lenses associated with affective and entanglement theories. As two credits of British literature are required for the degree, I did not choose the subject, but I chose (and had to fight for) the approach. The fact that I have to spend this much time studying British poetry, at the expense of anything else in any of the other Englishes of the world, let alone literature in translation, is a topic of refusal for another time, and there will be nothing micro about it. But for now: while wrapping up my draft, I asked my advisor to scan it for evidence of the naivete and assumptions that my white US-American training carries, so often underacknowledged or unacknowledged in the work of Western-derived academia. In thinking about whiteness and the coloniality of academia, I began thinking about how often we place so much emphasis in editing on structural coordination, template concordance, and other ‘standard/ized’ approaches (all dripping with coloniality), and wondering what could happen if scholars in positions of relative power began to turn our editing work more in the directions of my whiteness question. Maybe what we title our “Findings” section, where we put our punctuation relative to quotation marks, and whether our methodology is prepackaged and cite-able are not the most important things right now. Reviewer 2, I’m looking at you.
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Week 5 Microrefusal: Kesämökki
Monday 21 July 2025
Sunrise: 03.37, Sunset: 23.02 (Utäjärvi)
Mökki-time is its own refusal.
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Week 4 Microrefusal: Just
Monday 14 July 2025
Sunrise: 03.13, Sunset: 23.33 (Oulu)
Something I’ve been thinking about this past week, reflecting on the three academic conferences I attended in June: the frequency with which PhD level researchers use the word “just.” As in, “I’m just a PhD student” or something similar, a caveat I heard over and over again in introductions, in conversations about ideas and frustrations, in conference presentations. Often times, a supervisor was in the room, and it felt, to me, like this was being said for the benefit of the supervisor, or perhaps for other senior scholars who have subtly implied that this is expected, impostor syndrome a necessary currency to be initiated into the field. But if I think back to my “Top 10” of dozens of presentations I saw across multiple disciplines in three weeks of conferences, 8 of the 10 most memorable and compelling were offered by PhD students. The presentations lingering in my mind, poking at my consciousness, saying, “you aren’t done with this idea yet” were given by PhD students. What if we stopped saying (and expecting) “just”? What if we let our ideas speak for themselves, without apology?
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Week 3 Microrefusal: Musical Fireworks
Monday 7 July 2025
Sunrise: 02.50, Sunset: 23.54 (Oulu)
A playlist for the Fourth of July Weekend.
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Week 2 Microrefusal: Article Length
Monday 30 June 2025
Sunrise: 02.30, Sunset: 0.13 tomorrow (Oulu)
This past week I’ve been wrapping up my work as guest editor for a Special Issue of Knowledge Cultures that relates to social and planetary justice and decolonial aspirations in education. One of the articles for our issue is focused on Sámi contributions (historical and possible) to the educational landscape in Finland. As I read through this stunning piece, 15000 words with references, and felt a whole, interconnected picture form (with considerable attention to languages histories, deep care in attending to past and present erasures, episteme descriptions and celebrations, all intertwined in iterations throughout the piece), I was reminded of how much we stand to lose when we stick to formal structures like an 8000-word maximum as though it is a truth handed down from above. Some ideas need more time, some ideas need more space, and some ideas need multiple languages and diffractive forms to communicate their pluriversal meanings.
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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.