Working with Theories of Refusal and Decolonization in Higher Education 1032434384, 9781032434384

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of Contributors
Preface
Series Editors’ Introduction
References
Introduction: Refusing the Colonial University
Volume Themes and Introduction to Chapters
Part I: Refusing Coloniality of Life and Death in Higher Education
Part II: Antiracist Refusal and Political Pedagogical Action
Part III: (Po)Ethical Praxis of Refusal
References
Part I: Refusing Coloniality of Life and Death in Higher Education
Chapter 1: Conditions of Arrival: On Refusing to Be Included
Introduction
Ordinary Disorientation: Arriving as a Stranger
Good Times: Embodying Death and Doom
Recognition and Attachments: The Promise of Going Along to Get Along
A Praxis of Refusal
Affect Aliens and Living Ghosts
References
Chapter 2: The Affective Dimensions of Refusal in Higher Education Decolonization: Pedagogical Implications
Introduction
Theorizing Refusal as Affective Economy and Practice
Three Affective Modes of Decolonial Refusal in Higher Education
Pedagogies of Refusal in Higher Education Decolonization
Concluding Remarks
References
Chapter 3: Populating the Savage Slot: Decolonizing Auto-Ethnographic Refusals in Higher Education
Introduction
Voices, Ancestors and Other Kinds of “Mental Illness”
Savage Pedagogue
White Savages
By No Means a Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 4: Refusing Higher Education: Vivacide and the Economies of Dissipation
Refusing Higher Education: Vivacide and the Economies of Dissipation
Organization
Refusal, Refusals of Higher Education and Refusals of Coloniality
Self-Immolation and Indigenous Suicidology
Refusal as Necropolitics and Necroresistance
Summary
Indigenous Silence and Humour: Anticipating the Probability of Co-Opting Refusals
Refusal: The Exhausted Economies of Dissipation
Conclusion: Vivacide and the Political Lives from Death
Notes
References
Part II: Antiracist Refusal and Political Pedagogical Action
Chapter 5: Culturally Responsive Pedagogies: Australian Colonial Logic of the Centre and Aboriginal Refusal
Introduction
Indigenist Epistemology
Education Allegory and Culturally Responsive Pedagogies
The Struggle over Teachers Work
Teaching Synthesis
Aboriginal Child as Competent Knowledge Producer
A Commitment to the Politics of Refusal and Culturally Responsive Pedagogies
References
Chapter 6: Anger’s Erotic Politics: Antiracist Refusal as Decolonial Political Action
Introduction
Racist Silence and Silencing: Implication and Co-Optation
Refusing Implication 1: I Am Not Chinese
Refusing Implication 2: I Am Not Indigenous
Refusal as Breaking Silence: BIPOC Precarization, White Fragility
Refusal and Decolonial Relationalities: Resistance and Building Political Communities Through Affect
Conclusion
References
Chapter 7: (Re)imagining HESA through Refusal: The Complexities of Confronting Colonialism in the University
Introduction
Literature Review
How We Arrived at This Work
The Mythology of Higher Ed and Thinking Refusal
Disinvesting from the University as Refusal
Relationality and (Un)Learning as Refusal
(Beyond) Romanticizing Communities as Refusal
Conclusion and Reflections
Note
References
Chapter 8: Plastic Refusals: The Africanization Challenge of South African Higher Education
Introduction
Africanization and the South African Higher Education
Refusal
Plastic Refusals
Conclusion
Notes
References
Part III: (Po)Ethical Praxis of Refusal
Chapter 9: Refusing Archives of Possibility: A Decolonial Praxis of Temporalizing Ethics
Preamble
Reprise
Notes
References
Chapter 10: Refusing Coloniality: An Ethical Praxis of Paying Attention to Words in Academic Writing
Introduction
Notes
References
Chapter 11: Slow Reading as Refusal: Doing Higher Education Differently
Introduction
Refusal in South Africa
Neoliberalism in Higher Education
Refusal
Slow Scholarship
Slow Reading as Refusal
Refuse Superficial Reading of Large Tracts of Texts
Refuse Disciplinary Boundaries and Refuse Critique: Practice Diffractive Slow Reading
Refuse Instrumental Reading: Seek Pleasure in Slow Reading
Refuse Individualism: Practice Collaborative and Collective Slow Reading
Refuse Dominant Institutional Practices of Competitiveness, Meritocracy and Hierarchy
Conclusion
Notes
References
Afterword: Begin with a Refusal
Index

Citation preview

WORKING WITH THEORIES OF REFUSAL AND DECOLONIZATION IN HIGHER EDUCATION

This volume argues that refusal is a viable political ethics in education. It is an ethics that allows space for new possibilities to emerge, with the potential to enrich higher education study and pedagogies in the future. Chapters examine the ethical, epistemological, political and affective premises of refusing the colonial university, and reflect upon what refusal means for higher education decolonization across international settings. Refusal marks a political ethos and praxis that denies, resists, reframes and redirects colonial and neoliberal logics, while asserting diverse sovereignties and lifeworlds. Whereas resistance may reinscribe the weakness of the colonized in the power relations with the colonizer, refusal interrupts the smooth operation of power relations, denying the authority of the settler state and remaking the rules of engagement. It is a political stance and action that denies the very legitimacy of power over the subjugated. This collection views refusal not as an end in itself, nor as a mode of critique, but as a necessary first step for educators and students in higher education to invest in the idea of radically different modes of futurity. It explores how educators and students in higher education can invent pedagogies of refusal that function ethically, affectively and politically, and asks: What do pedagogies of refusal look like? How might Western universities sustain and support refusal, rather than discipline it? What assumptions are sustained by ruling out certain educational futures as out of bounds, or impossible? This book will be important reading for researchers, scholars and educators in Decolonizing Education, Higher Education Transformation, and Philosophy of Education. It will also be valuable to policymakers and activists who are considering how refusal might be carried out within and outside institutions. Petra Mikulan is Sessional Lecturer of Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia. Michalinos Zembylas is Professor of Educational Theory and Curriculum Studies at the Open University of Cyprus.

Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education Series Editors: Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang

Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education Mapping the Long View edited by Linda Tuhiwai-Smith, Eve Tuck, and K. Wayne Yang Applying Indigenous Research Methods Storying with Peoples and Communities edited by Sweeney Windchief and Timothy San Pedro Indigenous Children’s Survivance in Public Schools Leilani Sabzalian Decolonizing Place in Early Childhood Education Fikile Nxumalo Education in Movement Spaces Standing Rock to Chicago Freedom Square edited by Alayna Eagle Shield, Django Paris, Rae Paris, and Timothy San Pedro Urban Indigenous Youth Reframing Two-Spirit Marie Laing Tender Violence in US Schools Benevolent Whiteness and the Dangers of Heroic White Womanhood Natalee Kēhaulani Bauer

WORKING WITH THEORIES OF REFUSAL AND DECOLONIZATION IN HIGHER EDUCATION Edited by Petra Mikulan and Michalinos Zembylas

Designed cover image: Wylius / Getty Images First published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Petra Mikulan and Michalinos Zembylas; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Petra Mikulan and Michalinos Zembylas to be identified as the author[/s] of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 978-1-032-43438-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-43437-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-36731-4 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003367314 Typeset in Sabon by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)

CONTENTS

List of Contributors viii Preface xii Series Editors’ Introduction xv Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang Introduction: Refusing the Colonial University Petra Mikulan and Michalinos Zembylas

1

PART I

Refusing Coloniality of Life and Death in Higher Education 1 Conditions of Arrival: On Refusing to Be Included Asilia Franklin-Phipps and Robyn Stout-Sheridan

13 15

2 The Affective Dimensions of Refusal in Higher Education Decolonization: Pedagogical Implications Michalinos Zembylas

28

3 Populating the Savage Slot: Decolonizing Auto-Ethnographic Refusals in Higher Education Adam Rudder

45

vi  Contents

4 Refusing Higher Education: Vivacide and the Economies of Dissipation P. Taylor Webb PART II

59

Antiracist Refusal and Political Pedagogical Action

75

5 Culturally Responsive Pedagogies: Australian Colonial logic of the Centre and Aboriginal Refusal Lester-Irabinna Rigney

77

6 Anger’s Erotic Politics: Antiracist Refusal as Decolonial Political Action Shirley Anne Tate

93

7 (Re)imagining HESA through Refusal: The Complexities of Confronting Colonialism in the University 108 Agustin Diaz, Angie Kim, Alonso R. Reyna Rivarola, and Sharon Stein 8 Plastic Refusals: The Africanization Challenge of South African Higher Education André Keet, Michaela Ann Penkler, Luan Staphorst, Joseph Besigye Bazirake, and Daniella Rafaely PART III

124

(Po)Ethical Praxis of Refusal

143

9 Refusing Archives of Possibility: A Decolonial Praxis of Temporalizing Ethics Petra Mikulan

145

10 Refusing Coloniality: An Ethical Praxis of Paying Attention to Words in Academic Writing Elizabeth Mackinlay

164

Contents  vii

11 Slow Reading as Refusal: Doing Higher Education Differently 180 Vivienne Bozalek Afterword: Begin with a Refusal 198 Ella Martindale, Kaitlin Rizarri, John Pierre Craig, Jo Billows, and Jacqueline L. Scott Index 205

CONTRIBUTORS

Joseph Besigye Bazirake (Joe) is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the

Chair for Critical Studies in Higher Education Transformation (CriSHET) at Nelson Mandela University. Jo Billows is swift waters, secrets and salal berries. Northern Coast Salish

(Homalco/Klahoose), they were adopted out and grew up Vancouver Island. Currently living in Tkaronto, they are a PhD student in the Department of Social Justice Education at OISE at UofT. Vivienne Bozalek is an Emerita Professor in Women’s and Gender Studies

at the University of the Western Cape, and Honorary Professor in the Centre for Higher Education Research, Teaching and Learning (CHERTL) at Rhodes University. Her research interests include feminist new materialism, posthumanism, hydrofeminism and postqualitative research, and she is doing academia differently. John Pierre Craig, or JP, is a PhD student at the Ontario Institute for Studies

in Education in Tkaronto. They are Louisiana Creole and were born on Cahuilla land in Sec-­he. Agustin Diaz, or Tino, currently settles on the Eastern Shoshone and Tim-

panogos Ute areas of Utah. He teaches adjunct at the University of Utah while also working in areas of social impact. He also researches systems transformation in higher education, Indigenous epistemology and rhetoric of decolonization and abolition in student affairs.

Contributors  ix

Asilia Franklin-­Phipps is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Edu-

cational Studies at SUNY New Paltz in the United States, where she teaches Educational Studies, Art Education, and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Asilia holds a PhD in Critical Sociocultural Studies in Education (2018) from the University of Oregon. André Keet currently holds the Research Chair for Critical Studies in

Higher Education Transformation and is the Deputy Vice Chancellor for Engagement and Transformation at Nelson Mandela University. Angie Kim is a 1.5-­generation Korean immigrant, currently pursuing her

PhD in Higher Education at University of Michigan. Prior, Angie worked as an administrator in social justice education and residential life. Angie’s research critically examines institutional equity and inclusion work through the lens of racial capitalism and neoliberalism. Elizabeth Mackinlay is a Professor in the Faculty of Education at Southern

Cross University and writes passionately about words that move the world with love. Ella Martindale is Quw’utsun Mustimuhw. and grew up on Tsimshian and

Nisga’a territories. She currently lives in Tkaronto. She is a PhD student at OISE, studying Indigenous place-­based education with her communities. Petra Mikulan is a Balkan immigrant and a settler scholar currently teaching

in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia. Her work addresses transdisciplinary intersections between ideas of non-­vitalism and life as they pertain to feminist ethics, feminist race studies, decolonization, critical time studies and post-­qualitative reading. Michaela Ann Penkler holds a postgraduate degree in psychology. She is the

research coordinator for the deputy vice chancellor of Engagement and Transformation and Nelson Mandela University. Daniella Rafaely is a Lecturer in the psychology department at Wits

University. Lester-­Irabinna Rigney, Eminent Professor, is a descendant of the Narungga,

Kaurna and Ngarrindjeri peoples of South Australia. He is co-­chair of Pedagogies for Justice Research Group, Centre for Research in Educational and Social Inclusion, Education Futures Academic Unit, University of South Australia. He has led Australian Research Council projects in:

x  Contributors

Indigenist Research Epistemologies; Indigenous Education; and Australian Culturally responsive pedagogy. Alonso R. Reyna Rivarola (él/he) is Director of PACE Programs at Salt Lake

Community College, located in unceded Eastern Shoshone and Goshute territories. Alonso migrated to “Utah” when he was 11 years of age, where he grew up undocumented. His research is concerned with PK-­20 schooling practices and illegality. Kaitlin Rizarri is a community farmer in Tkaronto and a PhD student at

OISE. Her work is within food sovereignty and BIPOC relationality. She is Filipina from Cebu and San Fernando and a mixed Mi’kmaw/settler from Ktaqmkuk, Elmastukwek. Adam Rudder (he/they) is an Assistant Professor at Fairleigh Dickinson

University in the Department of Literature, Languages, Writing, and Humanities. His research is focused on necropolitics, cultural anthropology, decolonizing ethnography and Black Studies. Jacqueline L. Scott is of the Black Atlantic, based in Tkaronto. She is a PhD

candidate in the department of Social Justice Education, OISE, at University of Toronto. Her work is on race and nature. Robyn Stout-­Sheridan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Edu-

cational Studies at SUNY New Paltz in the United States with an affiliate appointment in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Robyn holds a PhD in Higher Education (2017) from the Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. Luan Staphorst is a Mandela Rhodes Scholar (2020–2021) and Abe Bailey

Fellow (2019) affiliated with Nelson Mandela University’s Chair for Critical Studies in Higher Education Transformation as a research associate. Sharon Stein (she/her) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Edu-

cational Studies at the University of British Columbia and a visiting professor of Critical Studies in Higher Education Transformation at Nelson Mandela University. She is a white settler scholar whose research focuses on the study and practice of internationalization, decolonization and climate action in higher education. Shirley Anne Tate is a Professor and Canada Research Chair Tier 1 in Femi-

nism and Intersectionality in the Sociology Department, University of

Contributors  xi

Alberta, Canada. She is Honorary Professor, CriSHET, Nelson Mandela University, South Africa, and Visiting Professor in CRED, Leeds Beckett University, UK. Her research is on Black Diaspora Studies, and her interests are institutional racism, the body, affect, beauty, hybridity, “race” performativity and Caribbean decolonial studies. P. Taylor Webb is a Professor in the Department of Educational Studies at

the University of British Columbia. Taylor’s research interests lie with Continental philosophy and different conceptions and practices of educational governance. He is currently serving as a lead editor for the Journal of Education Policy. Michalinos Zembylas is a Professor of Educational Theory and Curriculum

Studies at the Open University of Cyprus, Honorary Professor at Nelson Mandela University, South Africa, and Adjunct Professor at the University of South Australia. He has written extensively on emotion and affect in relation to social justice pedagogies, intercultural and peace education, human rights education and citizenship education.

PREFACE

This book is a result of our shared geopolitical concerns with the many injustices and colonial practices that higher education continues to reproduce with its insistence on business as usual, albeit differently in diverse globally local contexts. Before introducing the themes and ethico-­political interventions advocated in this collection of chapters, we would like to situate ourselves. Petra: In Memory Serves (2015), Lee Maracle, an Indigenous Canadian writer and academic of the Stó꞉lō nation, reminds us that “How we see the world and the power we have to intervene in the way we see ourselves is dependent upon the lens through which we view our mythology in the current context” (p. 89). At present, I find myself situated in the cultural, historical and political context of British Columbia, as a white woman settled uninvited on the shared, traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ speaking q̓ ícə̓ y̓ (Katzie), SEMYOME (Semiahmoo), Kwantlen First Nations and other Coast Salish Peoples (Musqueam, Qayqayt, Kwikwetlem and others would have used the Fraser River), who have been the stewards of this land since time immemorial. As a South Slav woman, my memories, stories, and rituals, all encoded in another language, have no intimate or temporal ties to the land I occupy now. Although we don’t often speak of the indigenous people of Europe, and rightly so, my ancestral mythologies and stories belong to the peoples of the Balkan region, an area often referred to as “Wild Europe” (Jezernik). My grandmothers tell me stories of their grandmother’s mothers, who were displaced, dispossessed and stripped of their local religions, their labour, their children. Forced to speak in tongues not their own, they nursed

Preface  xiii

royal infants from the North, and all the way to deserts across the Mediterranean Sea. Their many stories cut deep under my skin when I was growing up in the newly formed nation state of Slovenia (then part of Yugoslavia), moving in spaces as a girl with the wrong kind of a face, from the wrong side of the border, with the wrong kind of a last name (Rajkovič). And so, I continue to see myself walking in my mother’s refusal, her silent and persistent refusal of patriarchal violence of the 1991 ethnic war reverberates throughout my dreams. I have learned how to live angry. And for a decade now, here, on lands belonging to other mothers and their grandmothers, I enjoy all the privileges that white skin affords, and I continue to benefit from the ongoing accumulated riches of European settler colonialism and imperialism. My own intervention in the quotidian expectations and grammar of this settler world can only stay in this space of complicit violence. And while my ancestors fought across centuries for my right to speak in my own tongue and “our” land, I now write in a language that carries the very same imperial power, which affords me little affective attachment and intimacy of expression. This is the lens through which I live in betrayal of my own inherited mythology of refusal, here on the stolen lands permeated with someone else’s ancestral mythology of refusal; alongside a majestic river called “Sto:lo” in Halqemeylem, “Lhtakoh” in the Dakelh language and “ʔElhdaqox,” to the Tsilqot’in people. I listen with respect towards systems of knowing un(kn)own to me, with deep care-­for-­humility against the manifold modes of existing and relating that have always already persisted alongside her mighty arms. Michalinos: Being a white male living in a postcolonial country (Cyprus) that suffered the dire consequences of British colonization, I recognize the ambivalence of my positionality. I continue to benefit from my status as a white person, while struggling to make sense of the coloniality manifested in the institutions, practices and everyday life of my country long after the end of British colonial era in 1960. I am appalled by the racial ignorance of individuals, social groups and political parties in Cypriot public discourses concerning migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees (from the Middle East, Asia and North Africa) who find themselves in Cyprus (a member of the European Union) on their perilous journey to find a better and safer life in Europe. Concepts such as white racial ignorance and white supremacy have helped me over the years frame an understanding of how the denial of racism in my country promotes actual ignorance about the ways the world works, including ongoing forms of coloniality. Hence, my critique of coloniality and white supremacy operates in tandem with my complicity in them. As Ahmed (2004) reminds us, white people are not outside of the systems and social structures that benefit us at the expense of non-­white people. We must also remember, she explains, that to be

xiv  Preface

against something is to be in intimate relation with that which one is against. Therefore, I recognize that there is something awkward about claiming to be engaged in refusal and decolonization, while benefiting from the privileges of whiteness. Nevertheless, I eschew resolving my awkward position by resorting to feelings that recentre my whiteness (e.g., shame and guilt); rather, I embrace the responsibility of using my privileged position to work towards dismantling racial injustice, white supremacy and coloniality. My long-­time research on issues of decolonization and racism at various levels of education both in Cyprus and in other settings around the world (e.g., South Africa and Australia), especially through the lens of affect theory, constitutes my commitment to invent ways of interrogating the emotionalities of whiteness. I have gradually come to realize that white racial ignorance and coloniality are reproduced precisely because they constitute powerful affective regimes that feed themselves through mundane everyday emotional activities such as feelings of fear when blacks and whites encounter each other. To fight against white racial ignorance and coloniality, then, is to create new affective communities that refuse to exclude non-­whites.

SERIES EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang

“Refusal” is a word which – through the labour of students, writers, and notably, Native feminist scholars working alongside community knowledge holders – has come to describe practices, stances, escape routes, and epistemic spaces opened by various forms of ‘no.’ Indeed, refusal across many domains is vital for all of us who reject supremacist knowledge formation. To understand refusal, we continue to return to Audra Simpson’s (2007; 2014) crucial writings on ethnographic refusal. Asymmetrical power relations in research overdetermine whose knowledge counts, and whose knowledges are erased or extracted or dismissed. Therefore, refusal is necessary to allow forms of inquiry, analysis, and knowledge-­ bearing to continue to exist, but also to be kept out of view. In this regard, as Simpson’s work insists, refusal is generative (Simpson, 2007, 2014). One might think of the refusal stance as land protectors facing bulldozers, an action that supports all the generative life in the rainforests, deserts, waters behind them. For Simpson, refusal is a fundamental ethical and philosophical stance that respects “sovereignty as central to the lives, and the territorial integrity and the dignity of people that we work with” (2007, p. 75). More recently, Sandy Grande (2018) has written about refusing the university in a broader sense than refusal in research. She understands the university as material institutions of racial capital, (settler) colonialism, and accumulation. Grande’s analyses are strongly taken up and elaborated into new insights by many of the authors in this edited book. Refusal of the university not only might feel intuitive (as our very bodies might tell us to

xvi  Series editors’ introduction

reject its poisons) but also as we see in these writings, refusal is politically generative of Black, Indigenous, and Othered life in the academy. For those of us working in the university, these institutions are not just part of an abstract transcendent academy, they are embodied epistemic spaces. This book represents what we think of as a shift to a second phase of our series, Decolonizing and Indigenous Studies in Education, because it is a book that extends the scope of the initial imaginings that we had for the series. What attracted us to this book project were its propositions to attend to theories of refusal beyond North America: the Global South in Europe, in Africa, in Australia, and as Petra Mikulan and Michalinos Zembylas say in their introduction to this book, “with and against global (North/South) decolonial perspectives.” This book’s considerations of higher education attempt to de-­centre the hegemonic ‘norms’ of the imagined North American university. A contribution of this volume, then, is its focus on refusal in multiple, emplaced dimensions. The specificities herein comprised some of our favourite moments in the volume. Many of the writers are willing to show their vulnerability, their witty toughness, their empathy, their impatience, in the stories they tell to reveal refusal at work. In this way, we hope readers will see how the specificities of these stories, in and of themselves, refuse a universal model of refusal. There are as many forms as there are relations to be refused. As people who think and write about decolonization, we are often invited to read, contribute to writings, and participate in conversations about decolonization in higher education. We don’t always see this as at the heart of our work, and thus, are appreciative when others are willing to take it on. So much of higher education work is conceptualized in pedagogical terms – as it should be – while we have insisted that decolonization far exceeds pedagogy and intellectual activities. As is true for many writers on decolonization, including those in this book: Decolonization is more than theory. Or if it is theory, it is a theory that we have learned from the land. It is a theory carried in the bellies and the backpacks of ancestors and their ascendants. The afterword by the next generation of Black and Indigenous scholars is a loving reminder of land. Universities are not nowhere – no matter how convinced universities are in their own abilities to establish sublime utopias, detangled from the messiness of place. Universities are where they are, and indeed extract from other ‘wheres’ everywhere. The closing chapter returns what we know about refusal to the knowledges that we come to know by being in good relation to lands and waters. A rejoinder for any of us who want to make our presence a refusal to the colonial violences and enclosures of the university.

Series editors’ introduction  xvii

References Grande, S. (2018). Refusing the university. In E. Tuck, & K. W. Yang (Eds.), Toward what justice?: Describing diverse dream of justice in education. (pp. 47–65). Routledge. Simpson, A. (2007). On ethnographic refusal: Indigeneity, “Voice,” and Colonial Citizenship. Junctures: The Journal for Thematic Dialogue, 9, 67–80. Simpson, A. (2014). Mohawk interruptus: Political life across the borders of settler states. Duke University Press.

INTRODUCTION: REFUSING THE COLONIAL UNIVERSITY Petra Mikulan and Michalinos Zembylas

A concern with histories that hurt is not then a backward orientation: to move on, you must make this return. If anything, we might want to reread melancholic subjects, the ones who refuse to let go of suffering, who are even prepared to kill some forms of joy, as an alternative model of the social good. (Ahmed, 2010, p. 50)

In this collection of chapters, authors with different positionalities consider the ethical, epistemological, political and affective forces of refusing the colonial university in different international settings and explore the implications for theories, policies and pedagogies of refusal in higher education decolonization. The intention of this collection is to consider how a discussion of refusal alongside globally diverse local Indigeneities might contribute to understanding higher education decolonization in ways that cultivate new ethics and praxis of relationality and social justice for the (post-)Anthropocene. We aim to look at how diverse conceptual and methodological approaches to refusal may have a value for theorizing higher education against unified and unifying colonial futurity. It includes ideas on ethics which push boundaries of academic ‘niceness,’ ‘comfort’ and ‘optimism’, that is, affects that have served White educational researchers. It proposes new ways of conceptualizing relational ethics in higher education, working with theories of decolonization based on political and affective forces of refusal. More broadly, we hope to make a contribution to ongoing Southern and international debates about the epistemological, ethical, ontological DOI: 10.4324/9781003367314-1

2  Petra Mikulan and Michalinos Zembylas

and political implications of refusal in higher education, particularly in line with contemporary concerns for a need to redefine and redress different kinds of socially just possibilities and visions in higher education, ones premised not on settler colonial but, rather, on decolonial terms. To this end, several authors in this volume engage with their local historical and political university contexts pertaining to Black, Indigenous, queer and feminist theories of refusal and explore how such place-based pedagogies work both with and against global (North/South) decolonial perspectives. In recent years, ‘refusal’ is entering the political and ethical lexicon of various academic fields. Most prominently, in North America, it comes from Indigenous feminist thinkers (e.g., Eve Tuck, Jodi Byrd, Linda Tuhiwai Smith and Audra Simpson), Black feminist thinkers (e.g., Tina Campt, Denise Freirra da Silva, Sylvia Wynter, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson and Amber Jamilla Musser), White feminist thinkers (e.g., Bonnie Honig, Petra Mikulan and Nathalie Sinclair), fugitivity thinkers (e.g., Fred Moten and Stefano Harney) and cultural anthropology thinkers (e.g., Carole McGranahan). For these thinkers, refusal marks a political ethos and praxis that denies, resists, reframes and redirects colonial and neoliberal logics, while asserting diverse sovereignties and lifeworlds (Wright 2018). Refusal is a kind of “disinvestment” from certain rules and relations (Bhungalia 2020) such as those that enable colonialism and an “affirmative investment” (Weiss 2016, p. 352) to possibilities that invoke decolonization. The common ground of these approaches is their positioning of refusal as an active politics of dissensus from settler colonialism. The political ethics of refusal redefine anger, silence, resentment, resistance and other practices and values moving far beyond liberal individualist approaches that are grounded in Enlightenment ideas, seeing these affective practices as legitimate responses to settler colonial enclosures, extractivist practices of appropriation, excavation and displacement. If within the colonizing university there is also a decolonizing education (la paperson 2017), then it is important to engage in efforts that build new modes of academic practices and alliances which not only recognize, analyse and confront the university’s complicity in coloniality but also reclaim the academy as a decolonizing space (Luke and Heynen 2019; Stein 2019; Zembylas 2020). This is where refusal as a political ethos and practice may have a crucial contribution and why the two of us, as white editors born and raised on, respectively, the Balkan Peninsula and Southern Europe (Slovenia and Cyprus, respectively), decided to come together to think about refusal alongside this global community of scholars. We come committed to the conversation on refusal and decolonization from a particular geopolitical historical context, one fraught with what has become known as Balkanization. Similar to Orientalism, Balkanization

Introduction: Refusing the Colonial University  3

denotes a process of an insidious intellectual project of discursive “othering” of Europe’s internal “savages” that helped impart ethnic and religious conflict and racism in the region, backed up by a very long history of the many different imperial powers (Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, French and British, to name a few) colonizing this area and turning its indigenous populations against one another. An imperial and settler dream. Although much differently in terms of our cultural, gender and ethnic backgrounds, we also grew up in a geopolitical context of the nonalignment movement (NAM), the then Third World resistance against the bifurcation and bipolarization of the world into two blocks during the Cold War. The word “decolonization” was used at the inaugural meeting of the movement in 1955 in Yugoslavia (attending were Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah and Indonesian President Sukarno), and the intention of the NAM movement was summarized by Fidel Castro in his Havana Declaration of 1979 as to demand economic justice for our peoples and to bring an end to domination of our resources and the robbery of our sweat. Let us join together to demand our right to development [applause], our right to life, our right to the future. (Castro, 1979) In our separate corners of the Balkans and Southern Europe, we experienced, watched and listened to many a new revolutionary idea, uniting us across various ethnicities and religions against the hegemonic powers of the West and East, but we also watched bombs explode, bodies abused and blood spill on the streets of our cities, with new walls being built, literal and figurative. In our shared geopolitical commitment to decolonization, we wanted to bring together other scholars committed to refusal, working in the settler universities of both the Global South, and the Global North. To some readers, perhaps this is an unusual move in the current academic political context fraught with animosity from all sides, but our hope goes against what we recognize as a sort of academic balkanization of studies, separated into a growing number of divided “focus groups” ( i.e., Black, Native, Ethnic, Gender, White, Queer studies, etc.), which, in the first and final analysis, has always been the quest/drama of those who settle, occupy and rob the Other people of their dreams. This is not to say that integration, disintegration or inclusion are viable alternatives; it is only to say that as long as race and sex are (ab)used as biopolitical and moral tools of explanation (i.e., modern necessity of cause-and-effect determinacy), division and subsumption of parts and whole will continue to bifurcate this interpretive dialectic. Instead, we hope to continue the geopolitical push against

4  Petra Mikulan and Michalinos Zembylas

the “robbery of our sweat”, the extractive and expropriating political, economic and ethical practices of higher education. This collection of chapters is a refusal of higher education’s continuous monopoly, management and polarization of “our” world, and a cry towards other modes of sharing in relational coexistence that can shape worlds as yet unimagined. To this end, the authors in this volume examine the ethical, epistemological, ontological, affective and political premises that are constitutive of a theory of refusal in addressing higher education’s colonial relations. We analyse and synthesize a political affirmation of refusal in order to show that refusal may constitute a fruitful avenue towards decolonization of higher education, because it directs attention to the affective (dis)investments from/in desires that can be fulfilled by the university. Hence, this collection of chapters suggests that if the aim is to disrupt the seductive workings of colonial power in its most intimate dimensions, then it is crucial to invent practices and strategies that engage with the affective (dis) investments of students and educators in colonial relations. The authors also address refusal in higher education (in its contextual and international dimensions) as a viable (po)ethics that wagers in the name of future possibles not already governed by extractive politics of colonial progress and oppressive regimes of knowing and doing and contribute to ongoing transnational debates about the implications of our theoretical choices for enriching higher education study and pedagogies. There is the urgency to rethink higher education in ways that speak to current global geopolitical contexts and draw on radical Black, feminist, queer and Indigenous ethico-onto-epistemological and political developments of refusal alongside theories of decolonization. Any effort to make sense of the project of higher education today must be situated in the long history of colonialism (Wolfe 2006). Wolfe argues that for many centuries from the establishment of the early universities of medieval Europe to the beginning of the 20th century, higher education was at the service of the nation state (see also, Luke and Heynen 2019; Stein 2020). The European university model, grounded in Eurocentric epistemologies and colonial principles, has been imposed across the colonies in other continents – the Americas, Asia, Africa and the Pacific (Mignolo 2011). The model of the modern university, then, has its roots in religious expansionism and the Enlightenment values of Western modernity (e.g., freedom, democracy and citizenship). Yet the irony is that this model has operated within a set of fundamental contradictions – such as promising education to all students, yet excluding those who have been historically disenfranchised (e.g., the landless, women, Indigenous peoples and people of colour), and advocating humanistic values for all, yet dehumanizing colonized peoples (Chatterjee and Maira 2014).

Introduction: Refusing the Colonial University  5

Higher education, therefore, functioned not only as a key “technology” of colonial expansion in various continents but also in being complicit in social reproduction for capital accumulation and capital expropriation (Boggs and Mitchell 2018). In fact, in the name of market-based ideologies, such as “democracy” and the “public good”, higher education has been historically complicit in the further establishment of racialized, hegemonic and settler capitalism (Labaree 2017). Hence, it is important to acknowledge how the establishment of universities in many Western societies and colonies has been inextricably linked to colonial processes and practices that continue to shape contemporary higher education (Stein 2020). Unless the project of higher education recognizes, confronts and undoes its colonial legacies, it is difficult to imagine how the terms of current academic and political debates about the future of higher education will change (Patton 2016; Wilder 2013, Stein 2022). In other words, critiques of the modern Western university by critical Indigenous, Black, feminist and other de-/anti-/postcolonial theorists have identified higher education as central to settler colonialism and the frontier logic (Andreotti et al. 2015; Grande 2018; Grosfoguel 2007; Luke and Heynen 2019; Maldonado-Torres 2007; Stein 2019, 2020; Stein and Andreotti 2017). However, scholarship on decolonization in higher education has not paid enough attention to theorizing the political, ethical and affective contours of refusing the colonial university that continues its colonial grips in the (post-)Anthropocene. This book proposes that it is critical that any thought of educating students for our future accounts for the moral dissonance between the unrepentant hope and optimism in free progress and its violent condition in chattel slavery (violence, negation, extraction, desolation). We thus ask what sort of ethical and affective (dis)investments are needed in higher education to refuse the colonial university? In particular, how can educators and students in higher education invent “pedagogies of refusal” (Rodríguez 2019; Tuck and Yang 2014) that function ethically, affectively and politically to challenge colonial futurity? What do pedagogies of refusal look like? How might Western universities sustain and support refusal on otherwise terms, rather than subsume and discipline it? What assumptions are sustained by ruling out certain educational futures as out of bounds, or impossible? In the name of what and whose future do “we” want to sustain “our” universities and schools fraught with systemic racism? In response to these questions, the authors engage with philosophy, theory and practice to consider pertinent issues which are affecting students and academics in internationally diverse higher education contexts, such as inequality and marginalization of certain bodies, emotions and affects. Hence, refusal here is not an end in itself, nor is it a mode of

6  Petra Mikulan and Michalinos Zembylas

critique, but a necessary first step for educators and students in higher education to invest in the idea of radically different modes of futurity. Importantly, the politico-affective ethics and praxis of refusal, which this edited collection foregrounds, is different from “resistance”, which has monopolized theoretical interest across the social sciences for decades now (Bhungalia 2020) – ranging from Scott’s (1985) account on “everyday” or “invisible” acts of resistance to Foucault’s (2009) theorization of “counterconduct”. Despite considerable disagreements as to what exactly it denotes (Hollander and Einwohner 2004), resistance is generally understood as an oppositional act (Johansson and Vinthagen 2016). Refusal, however, is distinguished from resistance as it does not always entail an act of opposition, but rather it is “a kind of abstention, a disinvestment from rules of engagement” (Bhungalia 2020, 390). Whereas resistance, suggests McGranahan (2016), consciously defies or opposes superiors, albeit in a context of differential power relations, refusal “rejects this hierarchical relationship, reposting the relationship as one configured altogether differently” (McGranahan 2016, 323). In this sense, refusal is generative as it “moves away from default negative connotations into spaces that might be more social than antisocial” (McGranahan 2016, 322). As Simpson (2014) explains in her landmark ethnography of Mohawk political life and the Indigenous relations to the settler state, refusal operates very differently from resistance. Whereas resistance may reinscribe the weakness of the colonized in the power relations with the colonizer (settler state), refusal interrupts the smooth operation of power relations, denying the authority of the settler state and remaking the rules of engagement. Refusal, then, does not stand in opposition to repressive power and authority, as resistance does; instead, refusal is a political stance and action that denies the very legitimacy of power over the subjugated, seeking alternative forms of legitimacy (Bhungalia 2020). The authors in this book suggest in unique ways, that a politico-affective ethics of refusal attends to the structural deformations that are maintained by the epistemic praxis of erasure and dissimulation so prevalent in higher education (and schooling in general), which continue to insist on engaging with the presupposed and proper (good) possibles for social change. The politico-affective ethics of refusal, we argue, provides an alternative framework for higher education through its speculative, ontological, epistemological and political positioning. We believe fostering public and/or classroom pedagogies of refusal against the already-established and stratified racial positionalities, imaginaries and epistemologies to be one of the ways in which higher education can begin to address a certain incapacity of imagination to respond to educational pasts and futures otherwise. This is because the question of an ethics and praxis of refusal in higher education

Introduction: Refusing the Colonial University  7

is explicitly pragmatic, pedagogical and situated; it functions as a wager on the predetermined horizon of possible regimes of knowing, premised on the “racialization of matter” (Da Silva, 2017) and the accompanying dehumanizing geologic relations that deform the earth and “the psychic lives and modes of nonbeing” (Yussuf 2018, 90). Thus, it is possible to understand Denise Ferreira da Silva’s (2014) question of an ethics of refusal politically – “Is it an ethics, which instead of the betterment of the World as we know it aims at its end?” (82) – to be pertinent to the thought of ethics in education for the future, as it is a question of refusal of predetermined fields of possibles that continue to judge pragmatic success or failure of education always already convergent with colonial progressive terms. Finally, this edited volume provides a space to reimagine educational pedagogies that start not with taken-for-granted colonial, humanist assumptions that bifurcate the noumenal into “scientific” categories (Subject/Object, Time/Space, Mind/Matter) of representational thought, but one that refuses the proper, the good and the established regimes of knowing and doing in higher education. Such a reading opens new ethical and political responsibilities as well as brings potential challenges and risks. Volume Themes and Introduction to Chapters

The contributions to this volume build on and deepen previous scholarship on refusing the colonial university by developing a perspective on refusal as ethics and praxis situated within and modulated by different forms of colonial arrangements. They offer a fuller understanding of the myriad ways in which colonial universities can be refused. Firmly grounded in different social and political theories on refusal, the contributors bring their expertise and positionality in this area to bear on various dimensions of how to refuse the colonial university, covering a wide range of topics and empirical fields, for example affect, literature, culturally responsive pedagogies, antiracism, Africanization, academic writing and Slow reading. In this regard, many of the contributions provide a springboard for comparative analysis of different manifestations of refusal within particular sociopolitical settings of higher education. To do justice to the broad range of praxis of refusal in contemporary colonial universities, and also to cover the breadth and variety of forms of refusal at play in different contexts, this volume is organized in three themes/parts. The separate parts of this volume converge and diverge according to their own densities, tempos, folds and positionalities. A reader can follow each or any one of them sequentially, or pick randomly, since the different parts can be viewed as deeply intertwined; but only insofar as the reader’s own agency in following a twine/path will allow for.

8  Petra Mikulan and Michalinos Zembylas

Part I: Refusing Coloniality of Life and Death in Higher Education

In the first thematic part, authors thread the higher education’s demarcation between life-and-death affective practices and policies in higher education. They place emphasis on the ways in which the existence of Black and Indigenous academics in settler university is a refusal of its colonial structure of life and death, always already assumed for the undercommons. In Chapter 1, Asilia Franklin-Phipps and Robyn Stout-Sheridan consider what other ways of existing in academia become possible when one refuses to be included on its terms. Following Sara Ahmed’s concept of the affect alien (2010), they refuse deficit narratives and propose different investments, orientations and urgencies towards the university, ones premised on disorientation and dissonance. In Chapter 2, Michalinos Zembylas similarly asks, what sort of affective (dis)investment is needed in higher education to refuse the colonial university? Normative manifestations of power and control work through the seductive desires of coloniality, so his is a call to refuse its most intimate dimensions through inventing new higher education pedagogies that function affectively to disrupt colonial relations. To contemplate what other deaths and destruction awaits Indigenous and Black peoples if colonial and colonizing university remains intact, both Adam Rudder and Taylor Webb show how the acts of refusal might fuel the very expansion of financialized and neoliberal economies of violence in higher education. In Chapter 3, Rudder therefore suggests that while refusal is integral to decolonization, in colonial university, each event of refusal maps out new domains of control. In decolonizing refusal, Rudder thus turns to imagination, not as active force of domination or conquest, but a passive force of curiosity that is left after the death of the Slave and the Native. It is precisely the commitment to partial deaths and personal disinvestments, as those practices that sustain anti-colonial life within the university, that Webb problematizes with the idea of vivacide in Chapter 4. As an incessant process of dying and living, vivacide here denotes ways in which without death refusal becomes conscripted in political efforts to reform neoliberal university. Part II: Antiracist Refusal and Political Pedagogical Action

In this part, authors address political decolonial solidarities in disinvesting from the status quo of colonial violence perpetuated in higher education institutions. In different ways and in different local contexts, they centre refusal as decolonial and abolitionist political action. Thinking through how to cultivate culturally responsive pedagogies in the settler Australian

Introduction: Refusing the Colonial University  9

context, Lester-Irabinna Rigney suggests in Chapter 5 that colonial logic of the centre must be dislodged by pedagogical refusal if an improvement of Aboriginal academic engagement and achievement in postcolonial schools and universities is to be achieved. Rigney thus proposes that in disrupting the hegemony of contemporary policy, teachers’ professional development in pedagogical refusal of deficit teaching is a key for any change to occur in the future. In Chapter 6, Shirley Anne Tate draws on two auto-ethnographic examples as data to discuss the refusal of implication and co-optation in a particular type of racist violence of anti-BIPOC silencing when one does not belong to the targeted group, but in which one is invited to witness and/or participate. Tate draws on Audre Lorde’s ideas of the erotic politics of anger to show that the pain of anger is the catalyst for decolonial political action. In a dialogue geared towards a consideration of the many complexities that are integral to any effort against disinvestments from the continuity of coloniality in higher education, academics and practitioners, Agustin Diaz, Angie Kim, Alonso R. Reyna Rivarola and Sharon Stein discuss the context of higher education and student affairs in the United States to show how this filed is complicit in sustaining the ongoing systemic violence perpetuated by higher education. With Chapter 7, André Keet, Michaela Ann Penkler, Luan Staphorst, Joseph Besigye Bazirake and Daniella Rafaely conclude this part by discussing the notion of plastic refusals as an interpretive devise for provoking the thought of a radical potential for transformation of South African higher education, which they locate within decolonial and abolitionist critiques of the university in the local education context. Part III: (Po)Ethical Praxis of Refusal

In efforts to disinvest from contemporary demands of colonial university to sustain its Archive, the authors in this part focus on the (po)ethic practices of reading and writing which are complicit in reproducing the ontoepistemic violence of the continuous rehearsal of white modernity. In Chapter 8, Petra Mikulan asks in what ways does academia’s re-memorialization and self-preservation, through continued repetition, professionalization and re-narrativization of the authorized past and future Archive, also require temporalizing a decolonial praxis of an ethics of refusal; archiving that cannot be controlled but insists as an excess not sanctioned by linear temporality of the higher education’s Archive of possibility. In a creative intervention into academic writing in Chapter 9, a practice problematized as complicit in capturing, confining and containing bodies of knowledge in servitude to coloniality, Elizabeth Mackinlay asks how might

10  Petra Mikulan and Michalinos Zembylas

an ethical writing praxis of paying attention to words through refusal move us closer to the possibility of decoloniality in the academy? In the concluding chapter, Vivienne Bozalek develops several propositions focused on Slow reading as a practice of Slow scholarship and considers this alternative practice as a refusal of academia’s market principles of, among others, efficiency and excellence within and against the neoliberal and colonial logics of university. To wrap up the volume, the Series Co-Editor Eve Tuck kindly invited emerging scholars Ella Martindale, Kaitlin Rizarri, John Pierre Craig, Jo Billows and Jacqueline L. Scott to write an afterword. In a series of vignettes, they demonstrate refusal in higher education through their everyday connections with land and place as a pedagogy and a fundamental intervention to theorizations of refusal. References Ahmed, S. (2010). The promise of happiness. Duke University Press. Andreotti, V., Stein, S., Ahenakew, C., & Hunt, D. (2015). Mapping interpretations of decolonization in the context of higher education. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 4(1), 21–40. Bhungalia, L. (2020). Laughing at power: Humor, transgression, and the politics of refusal in Palestine. EPC: Politics and Space, 38(3), 387–404. Boggs, A., & Mitchell, N. 2018. Critical university studies and the crisis consensus. Feminist Studies, 44(2), 432–463. Castro, F. (1979). Sixth summit conference of the nonalined countries. Castro Speech Data Base - Latin American Network Information Center, LANIC (archive.org) Chatterjee, P., & Maira, S. (Eds.). (2014). The imperial university: Academic repression and scholarly dissent. University of Minnesota Press. Da Silva, D. F. (2017). 1 (Life) ÷ 0 (Blackness) = ∞ − ∞ or ∞ / ∞: On matter beyond the equation of value. e-flux #79. Da Silva, D. F. (2014). Toward a black feminist poethics. The Black Scholar, 44(2), 81–97. https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2014.11413690 Foucault, M. (2009). Security, territory, population: Lectures at the Collége de France 1977–1978 (Vol.4). Macmillan. Grande, S. (2018). Refusing the university. In E. Tuck and K. W. Yang (Eds.), Toward What Justice?: Describing Diverse Dreams of Justice in Education (pp. 47–65). Routledge. Grosfoguel, R. (2007). The epistemic decolonial turn: Beyond political-economy paradigms. Cultural Studies, 21(2–3), 211–223. Hollander, J. A., & Einwohner, R. L. (2004). Conceptualizing resistance. Sociological Forum, 19(4), 533–554. Johansson, A., & Vinthagen, S. (2016). Dimensions of everyday resistance: An analytical framework. Critical Sociology, 42(3), 417–435. Labaree, D. F. (2017). A perfect mess: The unlikely ascendancy of American higher education. University of Chicago Press.

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la paperson. (2017). A third university is possible. University of Minnesota Press. Luke, N., & Heynen, N. (2019). Abolishing the frontier: (De)colonizing ‘public’ education. Social & Cultural Geography. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.20 19.1593492 Maldonado-Torres, N. (2007). On the coloniality of being. Cultural Studies, 21(2–3), 240–270. McGranahan, C. (2016). Theorizing refusal: An introduction. Cultural Anthropology, 31, 319–325. Mignolo, W. (2011). The darker side of western modernity: Global futures, decolonial options. Duke University Press. Patton, L. D. (2016). Disrupting postsecondary prose: Toward a critical race theory of higher education. Urban Education, 51(3), 315–342. Rodríguez, Y. (2019). Pedagogies of refusal: What it means to (un)teach a student like me. Radical Teacher, 115, 5–12. Scott, J. (1985). Weapons of the weak—Everyday forms of peasant resistance. Yale University Press. Simpson, A. (2014). Mohawk interruptus: Political life across the borders of settler states. Duke University Press Stein, S. (2019). Beyond higher education as we know it: Gesturing towards decolonial horizons of possibility. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 38, 143–161. Stein, S. (2020). A colonial history of the higher education present: Rethinking land-grant institutions through processes of accumulation and relations of conquest. Critical Studies in Education, 61(2), 212–228 Stein, S. (2022). Unsettling the university: Confronting the colonial foundations of US higher education. Johns Hopkins University Press. Stein, S., & Andreotti, V. (2017). Decolonisation and higher education. In M. Peters (Ed.), Encyclopaedia of education philosophy and theory (pp. 1–6). Springer Science + Business Media. Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2014). Unbecoming claims: Pedagogies of refusal in qualitative research. Qualitative Inquiry, 20(6), 811–818. Weiss, E. (2016). Refusal as act, refusal as abstention. Cultural Anthropology, 31, 351–358. Wilder, C. S. (2013). Ebony and ivy: Race, slavery, and the troubled history of America’s universities. New York: Bloomsbury Press. Wolfe, P. (2006). Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native. Journal of Genocide Research, 8(4), 387–409. Wright, S. (2018). When dialogue means refusal. Dialogues in Human Geography, 8(2), 128–132. Zembylas, M. (2020). Toward an ethics of opacity in higher education internationalisation. Philosophy and Theory in Higher Education, 2(1), 91–115.

PART I

Refusing Coloniality of Life and Death in Higher Education

1 CONDITIONS OF ARRIVAL On Refusing to Be Included Asilia Franklin-Phipps and Robyn Stout-Sheridan

Introduction

In this chapter, we are concerned with survival – specifically how to do so with ongoing attention to how survival in academic institutions is often in tension with political commitments, embodied histories and hopes for the future (Hidalgo, 2019; Mitchell, 2018). We understand survival to be continuing to live or refusing to die, even as we know that we should eventually aim higher. We know that death, metaphorical and literal, is always besides, near or on the table. This knowledge produces us in particular ways that prioritize survival, which often requires ongoing, strategic and embodied refusals, undermining the disciplined subjectivity of faculty members historically unanticipated and unimagined as present (Ferguson, 2012; Hidalgo, 2019). We are newcomers to the institution, often perceived as strangers, but embrace this status as it allows us to be in relation to the institution, to the students and to the town in resistant ways that matter to our survival. We are interested in onto-epistemologies of survival and the role of refusal in that ongoing survival. We understand ourselves as already incommensurable (Yang & Tuck, 2012) as the critiques of the university live in our bodies, right alongside our attachments to the university. We are also complicit and worry over our labours being used to forward goals that undermine survival of all involved. These tensions shape and implicate us in our encounters with texts, students, classrooms and colleagues. We simultaneously benefit from the institution – healthcare, predictable paychecks, offices and access to a library, and we are also harmed in ways we are conscious of and in ways DOI: 10.4324/9781003367314-3

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we will never know. Additionally, we are aware that we as faculty members are positioned to do harm to others. Part of acknowledging this complexity is to practise responding differently to refusals of others when they are also trying to survive. We are curious about those refusals because we are also in resistant relationships to many of the things that make up university life. In our students we recognize how survival can be linked to refusing to give time, attention, energy, compliance and emotion as an affective micropolitics that is often read as laziness, ignorance or further indication of nonbelonging – refusing the subjectivities that are disciplined and surveilled (Odysseos & Pal, 2018), deftly avoiding consequences that they cannot bear and working a system that does not have their survival in mind. Because we must figure out how to survive, we are uniquely positioned to explore those tensions as we hold histories of accumulated experiences with exclusion, surveillance, marginalization and illegibility in our bodies as a condition of arrival (2012). Our bodies accumulate the ongoing effects of encounters with classism, racism and sexism in overlapping and distinct ways because of class, race and gender shaping our orientations towards and away from academic and institutional spaces. We think of these orientations and perspectives as useful and important – rare perspectives in an academy that uncritically worships middle class, liberal ideology, uncritical merit, bounded individualism and social hierarchy. We care for ourselves and for each other in ways that do not count, are not regarded as professional and refuse to do otherwise. As newcomers and in many ways strangers (Ahmed, 2000) in academic spaces, we see this relation as useful, particularly as the walls seem to crumble around us and new ways of being/doing/becoming are urgent. Inspired by our students who teach us about the present and require us to refuse the university policies, structures and norms that do not often have their wellbeing in mind, we craft new subjectivities. We act in secret, silently opting out, feigning ignorance, whispering in the shadows, hiding between corners, gossiping, not putting things in writing and avoiding conversations that we know will deplete and demoralize us. We infiltrate (Hidalgo, 2019) rather than expect inclusion. We save ourselves. We refuse with intention, but also instinctively – affectively out of step, misaligned, with what is hegemonic and taken for granted. We also acknowledge that the stakes are often not as high as they seem (Grande, 2018), so we navigate the edges and borders of what becomes possible in this place, at this time, through refusal. Ordinary Disorientation: Arriving as a Stranger

We are junior faculty members at a state college located in Upstate New York. Neither of us are from the geographic area and experience it as being often

Conditions of Arrival  17

hostile to us – but in different and overlapping ways. Asilia is a black woman from Los Angeles, California and Robyn is a white woman from Charlotte, North Carolina. Both of us are from elsewhere and do not share the culture of the place where we live and work. Neither of us have an extended family here and often feel isolated. We have these things in common, but we are differently located and thereby differently disoriented. We acknowledge the inherent tension at work, as we enter the institution differently and are differently read and engaged. We understand the complexity of speaking in unison even as we are very differently positioned by the institution – historically and presently. We are very differently disoriented in the institution which can create tensions between us, even ongoing attempts at solidary. Many of these tensions cannot and will not be resolved. We know this very well. There are limits to what we can say or know about the differences we are conscious of and the ones that we will never know well enough to speak of. We are bound by our different inheritances and constrained by the frames available to us. And yet, we attempt to engage this complexity in ways that produce new orientations to the institution. Writing this chapter has been tense. We are taken differently, we are known differently, we are evaluated differently, and different conclusions are drawn about where and how we belong in relation to the intuitional spaces we inhabit. We meet in a space of ongoing, often-tense, commitments to becoming differently in relation to each other and the institution in this fraught place, in this violent time, amid ongoing tensions. We do this through practices of refusal and disorientation. This is always an ongoing negotiation. We arrived at the university, one of us as a first-generation college graduate and the other as a first-generation graduate student, differently holding our legacies of not being entitled to the promise of education. Both are often confused about how we ended up here. Our trajectories to arrive here were not smooth, in specific and overlapping ways. Additionally, we began our careers tenure-line faculty at the beginning of a global pandemic with ongoing economic, social and political effects impacting how we could be oriented towards the university. Despite different histories and identities, we colluded to refuse, to infiltrate (Hidalgo, 2019) and critique taken-for-granted assumptions about what and who counted. We scoffed at who we were being asked to become and often refused in quiet ways that exploited the gaps between institutional desire to discipline and ability to do so. Early on we observed how little our voices, our health and our concerns mattered. We understood the gap between the rhetoric and the action, producing us differently from our colleagues who felt at home in the institution. We were disoriented early on, and this disorientation produced us

18  Asilia Franklin-Phipps and Robyn Stout-Sheridan

as vulnerable, but attuned to the possibility of agency, the possibility of refusal. Sara Ahmed writes about orientation: When we are orientated, we might not even notice that we are orientated: we might not even think ‘to think’ about this point. When we experience disorientation, we might notice orientation as something we do not have. (2006, p. 6) We noticed that we not oriented, and we trace that to the histories of colonization and slavery that are the foundation of the institution in which we find ourselves entangled and implicated (Grande, 2018; Zembylas, 2021). The disruption of Covid was disorienting for everyone, but not to the same degree. As newcomers and strangers, we became more attuned how our approaches to politics, collaboration, pedagogy, social justice was misaligned with the white, middle-class norms of the institution. The ongoing event of the pandemic, happening alongside the chaotic end of the Trump presidency, an increase in visible white supremacist, misogynistic and queerphobic violence, the resistance to that violence and a presidential election created a stressful context for beginning an academic position in an institution in crises. We read these events from a different vantage point. For academics, the overlapping events of different kinds of violence, both old and new, produced new affects under which the work (much of it meaningless) had to continue. The pandemic resulted in loss of community and mentorship, expanded responsibilities with little guidance, illness and exhaustion. As junior faculty, the effects were significant. Without a foundation of professional relationships or support, we often relied on each other to not only understand the new job but also what it means to do that job in a crisis – a global pandemic, alongside ordinary racial and economic violence (Colebrook, 2020). Our histories in institutions as students and adjuncts, along with beginning our academic positions around the time of a global pandemic, impacted how we know, imagine and inhabit the space of the university presently. Our orientations shifted and shifted again, producing us differently as knowers and learners in relation to the university spaces we inhabit. Ahmed writes: The work of inhabitance involves orientation devices; ways of extending bodies into spaces that create new folds, or new contours of what we call livable or inhabitable space. If orientation is about making the strange familiar through the extension of bodies into space, then

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disorientation occurs when that extension fails. Or we could say that some spaces extend certain bodies and simply do not leave room for others. (2006, p. 11) We both, in separate and overlapping ways, arrived at the university used to being disoriented, knowing how to contort ourselves in ways that allow livability (Berlant, 2011) and survival but do not require a complete loss of dignity. We both refuse to hand over dignity and often bear consequences for this refusal. We developed skills continuing to exist on ever shifting margins. Such skills are useful as the university changes shape and becomes both different and much the same. Often on the margins, we have attuned to the sociocultural and political in a way that allows for embodied and connected response. We understand why our working-class students are frustrated and angry and we recognize the pain that many of our students feel as they sit in classrooms that do not value their knowledge, experience or perspective. We feel it too. In fact, our desires for our students and the university are co-opted towards ends that mock our efforts at organizing, teaching and investing in academic spaces and community. Maldonado and Meiners (2021) write: [T]he university is always (re) positioning itself to answer the performative call and to (re) deputize, especially its ‘diversity’ and ‘social justice’ initiatives, toward counterinsurgent ends. It echoes, Amazon and the National Football League attempt to rebrand capital accumulation and exploitation with racial liberalism’s deputies in pocket, and universities issue dematerialized antiracism statements. (p. 85) We observed this (re)positioning over and over and became suspicious of newfound commitments to social justice that were reliant upon epistemological frameworks that we know to be a source of violence (Hartman, 2006; Mbembe, 2016; McKittrick, 2020) and are interested in creating different relationships to knowledge through teaching and learning. We also were frustrated by the institutional response to the pandemic, which was cruel to people with health concerns and care responsibilities. Entering the professoriate in this way disallowed us to ever be under any illusion about how university structures operate, who is served, in what order and why. We did not believe the hype, even as we did not have official data. Even so, we know that our experiences are not only bad and, in many ways, consider ourselves lucky to be in a space to write, think,

20  Asilia Franklin-Phipps and Robyn Stout-Sheridan

teach and learn. We invest in the future through hope – a hope that comes in waves and is often a result of collaborations with colleagues and students done during the off hours. We have said the phrase over and over: I hope next year is better. This optimism is desperate and often misplaced. Lauren Berlant writes, “Cruel optimism’ names a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility whose realization is discovered to be impossible, sheer fantasy, or too possible and toxic” (2011, p. 94). The hope, the desire, the attachment to the ideals of higher education becomes a site of cruel optimism. We wish and hope that with the right program, the right panel, the right working group, the right book and the right syllabus the university can become anew – a site where historical violence in present iterations will be meaningfully engaged and, thus, responded to. Despite having all the components for such a meaningful shift, we also know that this is “sheer fantasy,” but we do not yet feel that the only answer is to exit. However, “One makes affective bargains about the costliness of one’s attachments, usually unconscious ones, most of which keep one in proximity to the scene of desire or attrition” (Berlant, 2011, p. 94). We continue to negotiate a way to remain – separately and apart– with students and with beloved colleagues. Good Times: Embodying Death and Doom

Good things come from an education in the United States, at least for some people. US cultural and institutional promises of betterment, equity, mobility, diversity and inclusivity create affect aliens in the space of the university, a space where “we become alienated—out of line with an affective community—when we do not experience pleasure from proximity to objects that are attributed to being good” (Ahmed, 2010, p. 41). The attribution and discursive (un)sustainability of white supremacist ideals as best/good practices in educational systems create dissonant affects and perpetuate “business as usual” while discursively claiming diversity and inclusion. Diversity and inclusion become the promise of institutional goodness; yet the historical violence of fictive promises shakes open the discursive and felt pain of being and doing “good” and allows us to situate how not good such empty promises feel in the body. In response to the “contagion” of the rhetoric of diversity in higher education, Ahmed (2006), in her work on “doing diversity”, troubles how “diversity and equality are not only documented, but they are also being transformed into documents that can be evaluated by an agreed set of measures” (p. 97). The metrics of goodness become a measure of proof of validity or worthiness – this is always classed, raced and gendered.

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Non-compliance is reframed as unprofessional, un-collegial, unreasonable or ungrateful. The difficult part is none of this is stated. And while both of us often are conscious of our resistance, we often do not understand the norms and expectations that our white, upper-middle class colleagues hold but do not explicitly state. We are not in on the joke. This creates disorientation and confusion for us. We are often anxiously waiting for an unexpected consequence for our ignorance. We refuse to take this ignorance as evidence of our inadequacy or inferiority (Mitchell, 2018). Instead, we embrace it as we recognize the arbitrariness of the hierarchies of knowledge. In the hierarchical and power-obsessed university structure, junior faculty, lecturers, post-docs and adjuncts are often silent and silenced, even as that might be to different degrees. We are rarely asked what we think about things, and, if we are asked, any response not aligned with consensus is ignored. It is in the zombie slime of the university structure. But our silence, our refusal to echo, to nod and to engage are noticeable. We are not on board. We are constructed as blockage points to progress. Sara Ahmed writes about some bodies being blockage points: Some bodies are presumed to be the origin of bad feeling insofar as they disturb the promise of happiness, which I would re-describe as the social pressure to maintain the signs of getting along some bodies become blockage points where smooth communication stops. (2010, p. 39) We become blockage points to proposals and plans for reforms that build careers but make little material difference. Communication stops, committees are disbanded and events are cancelled. Futile liberal anti-racist politics do not serve those people caught in the grips of social violence; we want to become blockage points through refusal. Both of us have been “the origin of bad feelings” because of our public refusals to go along, willingness to argue the point and reframe the argument on terms that make sense to us, even though we know we are wasting our breath. We understand how this might affect one’s career, but not in the way that we are often warned by those who are deeply committed to and invested in the status quo. We recognize the violence of liberal politics (Melamed, 2011). We watch as people marshal the social violence that our colleagues and students experience to forward their careers in crass and self-serving ways. We see the pain and suffering of students being ignored, despite rhetoric to the contrary. We also have learned how amenable this liberal version of racial justice politics is for capture and containment, not in the abstract or theoretical, but with material effects and before our very eyes.

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In the context of higher education, zombies typically exist as the soulsucked, living dead and disembodied workers of the institution (Whelan et al., 2013). The metrics of goodness within a neoliberal push turn living people into a dead living bunch of repetitive, non-thinking staggerers who navigate the academy propelled by the relations and politics of recognition, competing for consumption and consuming to compete. The zombie becomes a useful “political metaphor through which anxieties about globalization, economic forces, power relations and changing conceptualizations of identity and the body are articulated” (Whelan et al., 2013, p. 5). Freire (1970) also spoke of death orientations when naming the oppressor as necrophiliac in their obsession with death, “for the oppressors, ‘human beings’ refers only to themselves” (p. 57). He went on to further explain that “necrophiliac” control is “nourished by love of death, not life” (Freire, 1970, p. 77). We exist within a death loving and dead living culture of the university, which, to be clear, is an extension of the broader culture of death. Given the effects of history, violent economic imperatives and sociocultural entanglements, we find ourselves lost in higher education institutional spaces that (we believe) continue to be a site of possibility and potential but are struggling to reconcile with the everyday violence that we see perpetuated against our students, our colleagues and ourselves. The alienation that results from existing in a white supremacist institution takes up public space and bodies, settles land and ideas and makes promises it knows it has no intention of keeping. The university is “one part of a larger ecology that endures in a global climate of coloniality, where extraction, expropriation, and accumulation shape our physical and affective landscapes” (Snaza & Singh, 2021, p. 2). Extraction, expropriation and accumulation describe the type of vicious relationship often associated with the zombie. The wake of destruction that we consistently find ourselves in, as a space of business as usual, must also reckon with destruction as a kind of death. “When given the space of freedom from the capture of being a zombie, we see the un-dead choose death over a life of capture” (Koné, 2019, p. 162). This death is not a death of the body but a death of a way of being which results from oppression and alienation. This death is relationally constituted, and refusal is a hidden pathway that leads one from death into life differently in these doomed institutions. Zombies are singular in their desire to eat. They will eat at any cost leaving a wake of destruction. We want to eat too, but we refuse to eat everything in sight and refuse to do so at any cost. We want to acknowledge that this is a stuck place, an impasse (Berlant, 2011). We refuse the right-wing talking point that suggests that one cannot complain about things that one benefits from. Love-it-or-leave is not a meaningful response.

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At the same time, we recognize the tension in theorizing resistance when we remain in positions that are complicit with the very thing that we critique. We acknowledge and engage this tension. We want to think about what it means to refuse even while we remain. What kind of different orientations can we invent? What happens if we give up on reconciliation and use energy, time and resources in ways that are not sanctioned by the university and serve different ends? Recognition and Attachments: The Promise of Going Along to Get Along

Going along comes with rewards. Performing one’s pain can be professionally expedient. Give the people what they want. Less discussed are the costs that are associated with going along to get along. “Maintaining public comfort requires that certain bodies ‘go along with it,’ to agree to where you are placed. To refuse to be placed would mean to be seen as trouble, as causing discomfort for others” (Ahmed, 2010, p. 39). Refusing to go along causes trouble. Both of us have been the source of trouble. We are in trouble in a troubled university. Double trouble. Despite significant evidence to the contrary, getting a position that is on the tenure-track is still widely regarded as a path to “the good life” (Berlant, 2011). Low pay, ever-changing working conditions and steadily rising expectations for productivity put a damper on things but are not often a deal breaker. Academics shuffle from campus to campus after painful application and interview processes to arrive at a position that they can live with. During very difficult working conditions (particularly for those contingent and junior faculty), the promise of a better situation and the goodies that come along with that better situation remain a powerful incentive to endure. But this promise comes at a cost. And while we might be able to endure, we might not survive. What happens if we give up on things getting better and invest in a different orientation to the present and the futures? What if we let go of that cluster of promise that is attached to faculty life? What if we remain, but refuse to die? To refuse the promise of happiness (Ahmed, 2010) in higher education establishes junior and contingent faculty as affect aliens. Refusing the happiness of inclusion that is offered in academic spaces is a praxis of refusal. Ahmed writes: I think it is the very exposure of these unhappy effects that is affirmative, that gives us an alternative set of imaginings of what might count as good or better life. If injustice does have unhappy effects, then the story does not end there. Unhappiness is not our endpoint. If anything, the experience of being alienated from the affective promise of happy

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objects gets us somewhere. Affect aliens can do things, for sure, by refusing to put bad feelings to one side in the hope that we can ‘just get long’. (Ahmed, 2010, p. 50) We see the creative potential of not getting along and of refusing to do so. We agree with Ahmed that this is not happiness, but it is not just unhappiness (Dumas, 2014). We feel that we are getting “somewhere” in quiet and secret ways. A Praxis of Refusal

In the summer of 2020, we watched the collective resistance to police brutality closely, noting its potential and limitations. We also observed how the anti-racist energy was being captured and transformed to serve the ends of the institution. On our campus and others, we noted how official anti-racist programming and initiatives could never do what they said it was doing. Much of this institutionally sanctioned anti-oppression work relies on the assumption of one group’s ignorance and centres around the attempt to educate said group about racism, colonialism, sexism, queerphobia and patriarchy as though those things are stable and predictable things (Ellsworth, 1989). This work is what Ahmed calls non-performative (This often involves attempts to get the broader university structure to recognize the importance of such anti-oppressive work and by extension those engaged in that work.) It is important to note that faculty of colour, even those who do so because of their academic labour and not because of their racial identity, do not have access to this same recognition. The recognition game is a trap because recognition from institutions steeped in “technologies of domination” (Grande, 2018, p. 52) requires things in exchange for recognition. Sandy Grande writes: [A]cts of recognition—of acknowledging and respecting the status, being, and rights of another—became integral to theories of justice. Stated differently, political theories of recognition help to expose the conditions of oppression that arise when individuals are denied the equitable grounds upon which to formulate healthy notions of the self because of a given society’s dominant and exclusionary patterns of interpretation and valuation. (2018, p. 56) Despite being very aware of how the affective energy and emotion are captured, managed, and surveilled in ways that do not serve the hopes we

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have for our students and ourselves, we are not unmoved by desires to be recognized as members of the community – as thinkers and knowers. This cluster of promises cannot be disentangled from our histories as firstgeneration academics. Despite many disappointments and betrayals, we continue to see possibilities in our work with students and colleagues in the university and academic space. We too are tempted by invitations to participate in ways that allow us to be recognized as knowers, colleagues and team players. Refusal complicates these desires in ways that are not resolvable. Going along – collegiality – is rewarded with recognition, admiration, friendship, better schedules, better reputations and better professional opportunities. The rewards for going along to get along serve the zombie institution. Refusal can be a loophole around going along, but refusal will never help one achieve that cluster of promises associated with an academic position. This must be okay. This is a different kind of happiness than the one that is promised by sacrificing yourself fully to late-stage capitalism, the promise of transformation under the institutionally approved rhetoric of social justice and anti-racism. “The experience of a gap between the promise of happiness” or in our case, the promise of university teaching and scholarship- “does not always lead to corrections that close this gap…we become strangers, or affect aliens in such moments” (Ahmed, 2010, p. 42). We are inspired by the potential of becoming affective aliens and embracing our status as strangers. Affect Aliens and Living Ghosts

Late-state capitalism is violent and is killing us, but not all of us are on the same timeline. In this case, we do not mean as academics, we mean as people constantly surveilled with shifting access to reliable healthcare, housing, and clean air and water. Exchanging labour and time for money is not a dream or a joy. This was all a scam. We feel this in our bodies, and we see it in our colleagues and the young people we work with who increasingly reject the idea that work is a dream. Our jobs, not just in the academy, but all jobs to varying degrees are difficult in a myriad of ways that exhaust and overwhelm us. The joy is in relationships with colleagues and students, reading and thinking in new ways, and creating new ways of teaching and learning. The joy is also in refusing to give up political commitments to relationality, sustainability and collectivity. We find joy in being in reciprocal and caring relationships with colleagues even as those commitments can stall one’s advancement and access to recognition. This way of being together is a work-around, a glitch, which resists the capture and co-optation of resistant politics that is so dishearteningly common.

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This is the happiness that does not come from the things that are supposed to make us happy. Ahmed writes about gaps and becoming affect aliens: The gap between the affective value of an object and how we experience an object can involve a range of affects, which are directed by the modes of explanation we offer to fill this gap. If we are disappointed by something that we expected would make us happy, then we generate explanations of why that thing is disappointing. Such explanations can involve an anxious narrative of self-doubt (why am I not made happy by this, what is wrong with me?) or a narrative of rage, where the object that is ‘supposed’ to make us happy is attributed as the cause of disappointment, which can lead to a rage directed toward those that promised us happiness through the elevation of this or that object as being good. We become strangers, or affect aliens, in such moments. (2010, p. 37) We have described ourselves as strangers, fakers, aliens and lost ghosts – infiltrating spaces where we are not always wanted. We do not have a map, but we are making one. This map is not external, a crumpled paper or app on a phone. It is an internal map that facilitates escape from capture. The thing about zombies is that they move only as repetition, disembodied jerks of feet and hands, leading them always in the same destructive direction. To refuse capture, to refuse dead living, one must be in their bodies differently in the academy. Become invisible at times. Be felt but not seen. Make space(s) for the ghosts and affect aliens, ourselves and those who haunt from beyond the veil of time. These spaces are ever under the threat of zombie consumption; therefore, we shape and space shift, to remain stranger/strange to the banality of institutional doom. References Ahmed, S. (2006). Queer phenomenology: Orientations, objects, others. Duke University Press. Ahmed, S. (2007). A phenomenology of whiteness. Feminist Theory, 8(2), 149–168. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700107078139 Ahmed, S. (2010). The promise of happiness. Duke University Press. https://doi. org/10.1515/9780822392781 Ahmed, S. (2012). On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional life. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822395324 Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel optimism. Duke University Press. Dumas, M. (2014). Losing an arm: Schooling as a site of Black suffering. Race, Ethnicity, and Education, 17(1), 1–29.

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Ferguson, R. (2012). The reorder of things the university and its pedagogies of minority difference. University of Minnesota Press. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Continuum. Grande, S. (2018). Refusing the university. In E. Tuck & W. Yang (Eds.), Toward what justice? (pp. 47–65). Routledge. Hartman, S. (2006). Lose your mother. Duke University Press. Hidalgo, J. (2019). “Assume you don’t belong”: A mindset for academic survival. Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 35(2), 85–87. https://doi.org/10.2979/ jfemistudreli.35.2.08 Koné, M. (2019). Black zombie: Capture, slavery, and freedom. National Political Science Review, 20(3), 150–164. Mitchell, K. (2018). Identifying white mediocrity and know-your-place aggression: A form of self-care. African American Review, 51(4), 253–262. https://doi. org/10.1353/afa.2018.0045 Maldonado, D., & Meiners, E. (2021). Due time: Meditations on abolition at the site of the university. Social Text, 39(1), 69–92. https://doi.org/10.1215/ 01642472-8750112 Mbembe, J. (2016). Decolonizing the university: New directions. Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 15(1), 29–45. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474 022215618513 McKittrick, K. (2020). Dear science. Duke University Press. Melamed, J. (2011). Represent and destroy rationalizing violence in the new racial capitalism. University of Minnesota Press. Odysseos, & Pal, M. (2018). Toward critical pedagogies of the international? Student resistance, other-regardedness, and self-formation in the neoliberal university. International Studies Perspectives, 19(1), 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1093/ isp/ekx006 Randell-Moon, H., Saltmarsh, S., & Sutherland-Smith, W. (2013). The living dead and the dead living: Contagion and complicity in contemporary universities. Squire, C., Williams, B. C., & Tuitt, F. (2018). Plantation politics and neoliberal racism in higher education: A framework for reconstructing anti-Racist institutions. Teachers College Record (1970), 120(14), 1–20. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/016146811812001412 Snaza, N., & Singh, J. (2021). Introduction: Dehumanist education and the colonial university. Social Text, 39(1), 1–19. Whelan, A., Walker, R., & Moore, C. (2013). Zombies in the academy: Living death in higher education. Intellect Books. Zembylas, M. (2021). Affective strategies of abolition pedagogies in higher education: Dismantling the affective governmentality of the colonial university. Equity & Excellence in Education, 54(2), 121–135. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 10665684.2021.1951396

2 THE AFFECTIVE DIMENSIONS OF REFUSAL IN HIGHER EDUCATION DECOLONIZATION Pedagogical Implications* Michalinos Zembylas

Introduction

A theme that has recently emerged in contemporary literature on decolonization in higher education is refusing the (colonial) university (Grande, 2018; Metcalfe, 2019; Tuck & Yang, 2014a, 2014b, 2018). The university historically “functioned as the institutional nexus for the capitalist and religious missions of the settler state, mirroring its histories of dispossession, enslavement, exclusion, forced assimilation and integration” (Grande, 2018, pp. 47–48). Hence, refusing the university means taking a political stance and action “within, against, and beyond the university-as-such” (Grande, 2018, p. 51). The notion of “refusal”, which is rooted in cultural anthropology (McGranahan, 2016) and Indigenous studies (Coulthard, 2014; Simpson, 2007, 2014, 2016), marks a political ethos and praxis that denies, resists, reframes and redirects colonial and neoliberal logics, while asserting diverse sovereignties and lifeworlds (Wright, 2018). Refusal is a kind of “disinvestment” from certain rules and relations (Bhungalia, 2020) such as those that enable colonialism and an “affirmative investment” (Weiss, 2016, p. 352) to possibilities that invoke decolonization. While some accounts on the politics of refusal acknowledge the affective modes of legitimating and reproducing colonial hegemony (e.g., see Coulthard, 2014; Simpson, 2016), scholarship on decolonization in higher

* This is a shorter, reworked version of the article “Refusal as affective and pedagogical practice in higher education decolonization: A modest proposal”, which was published in Teaching in Higher Education (2021). DOI: 10.4324/9781003367314-4

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education has not paid enough attention to theorizing the affective contours of refusing the colonial university. So, I ask in this chapter: What sort of affective (dis)investment is needed in higher education to refuse the colonial university? In particular, how can educators and students in higher education invent “pedagogies of refusal” (Rodríguez, 2019; Tuck & Yang, 2014a) that function affectively and politically to challenge colonial futurity? What do pedagogies of refusal look like? As Stein (2019b) has pointed out, our intellectual analysis of the university’s colonial history as harmful does not necessarily “translate” into an affective disinvestment from desires that perpetuate colonial violence in higher education (see also, Stein, 2019a). Hence, it is important to explore what it means for educators and students in higher education to invest in forms of feeling and relating that refuse the colonial university and work towards its “abolition” (Moten & Harney, 2004). “Affects” are generally understood as relational and embodied intensities (Seigworth & Gregg, 2010) that circulate in “affective economies” in which feelings are mobilized to create particular affective attachments (Ahmed, 2004) that mark the ways in which things become significant and relations are lived (Anderson, 2014). It is suggested, then, that affects are “forces of encounter” which are intertwined with discourse, power and the body (Zembylas, 2021). In this sense, “refusal” may be conceptualized as an “affective practice” (Wetherell, 2012) which produces political effects and desires that challenge normative manifestations of power and control. As Mühlhoff argues, “Every political movement and every critical project is driven by affects, so the point is not whether or not affect is relevant, but how it is involved” (in Kemmer et al., 2019, p. 26, original emphasis). What I am interested in this chapter, therefore, is how refusal may constitute a fruitful avenue towards decolonization of higher education precisely because it directs attention to the affective (dis)investments from/in desires that can be fulfilled by the university. The main objective of this chapter, then, is to discuss the affective contours of refusing the colonial university and articulate what this analysis implies for pedagogies of refusal in higher education decolonization. The discussion proceeds as follows: the first section provides a theorization of refusal in cultural anthropology and Indigenous studies, focusing in particular on how refusal may be conceptualized in the terms of affective economy and affective practice. The second section takes McGranahan’s (2016) theorization of refusal in generative ways as a point of departure to outline three affective modes of decolonial refusal that challenge the colonial university: refusal as social and affiliative; refusal as distinct from resistance; and refusal as hopeful and wilful. The last section of the chapter concludes with outlining how these affective modes “translate” into an ethos of pedagogies of refusal for decolonization in higher education.

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Theorizing Refusal as Affective Economy and Practice

The notion of “resistance” has monopolized theoretical interest across the social sciences for decades now (Bhungalia, 2020) – ranging from Scott’s (1985) account on “everyday” or “invisible” acts of resistance to Foucault’s (2009) theorization of “counter-conduct.” Despite considerable disagreements as to what exactly it denotes (Hollander & Einwohner, 2004), resistance is generally understood as an oppositional act (Johansson & Vinthagen, 2016). Refusal, however, is distinguished from resistance as it does not always entail an act of opposition, but rather it is “a kind of abstention, a disinvestment from rules of engagement” (Bhungalia, 2020, p. 390). Whereas resistance, suggests McGranahan (2016), consciously defies or opposes superiors, albeit in a context of differential power relations, refusal “rejects this hierarchical relationship, reposting the relationship as one configured altogether differently” (McGranahan, 2016, p. 323). In this sense, refusal is generative as it “moves away from default negative connotations into spaces that might be more social than antisocial” (McGranahan, 2016, p. 322). As Simpson (2014) explains in her landmark ethnography of Mohawk political life and the Indigenous relations to the settler state, refusal operates very differently from resistance. Whereas resistance may reinscribe the weakness of the colonized in the power relations with the colonizer (settler state), refusal interrupts the smooth operation of power relations, denying the authority of the settler state and remaking the rules of engagement. Refusal, then, does not stand in opposition to repressive power and authority, as resistance does; instead, refusal is a political stance and action that denies the very legitimacy of power over the subjugated, seeking alternative forms of legitimacy (Bhungalia, 2020). As Simpson (2014) argues: [T]here is a political alternative to “recognition,” the much sought-after and presumed “good” of multicultural politics. This alternative is “refusal,” […] as a political and ethical stance that stands in stark contrast to the desire to have one’s distinctiveness as a culture, as a people, recognized. Refusal comes with the requirement of having one’s political sovereignty acknowledged and upheld, and raises the question of legitimacy for those who are usually in the position of recognizing. (p. 11) Liberal recognition in multicultural politics, according to Simpson, is refused on the grounds that it is limited to the mere recognition of cultural difference, not to mention that it fails to acknowledge the heterogeneity of Indigenous peoples. Most importantly, though, liberal recognition excludes

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political or land rights; thus, it is of little use in decolonization struggles (Burman, 2016). The political regime of recognition emphasizes Simpson (2016), is rooted in colonial practices that enforced Indigenous dispossession and then granted freedom through the legal tricks of consent and citizenship. Hence, refusing liberal recognition is a practice that contributes towards decolonization because it insists on highlighting the lived experiences and desires of the oppressed and colonized (Murdick, 2019). Practically, refusal is manifested in various activities such as refusing to vote, pay taxes or travel on settler nation documents (Simpson, 2014). In tracing these refusals, Simpson invites us to consider what happens when consent is withdrawn and the ontological fixity of the settler state is unsettled (Bhungalia, 2020). In a similar vein, Coulthard (2014) critiques the politics of recognition in the settler state’s efforts for reconciliation, and questions the “specific modes of colonial thought, desire and behavior that implicitly and explicitly commit the colonized to the types of practices and subject positions that are required for their continued domination” (p. 16). For Coulthard, refusal is the starting point for prefiguring “radical alternatives to the structural and subjective dimensions of colonial power” (Coulthard, 2014, p. 18). He advocates Indigenous resurgence and thus recommends to “redirect our struggles away from a politics that seeks to attain a conciliatory form of settler-state recognition for Indigenous nations toward a resurgent politics of recognition premised on self-actualization, direct action, and the resurgence of cultural practices” (Coulthard, 2014, p. 24, original emphasis). In other words, for Coulthard, refusal is a positive rather than a negative stance – one that is less oriented around affirmative forms of settler colonial state recognition and more about re-evaluating, reconstructing and redeploying culture and tradition in the Indigenous practices of living. In this way, Coulthard reorients the project of decolonization to place Indigenous liberatory practices at the centre of political transformation (Burman, 2016). Undoubtedly, refusal is a political stance and praxis, as the works of McGranahan, Simpson and Coulthard show. Importantly, “The political describes distributions of power, of effective and affective possibility”, points out Simpson (2016, p. 326, added emphasis). Similarly, Coulthard (2014) writes about the significance of the “psycho-affective attachment” to colonialist forms of recognition and the ways in which colonial desires are cultivated and internalized. One of the aspects of coloniality that is gradually coming to the forefront of discussions in recent years, then, is the colonial legacies of affects and emotions, that is, how affectivity plays a major part in relations of coloniality and oppression just as in seeking alternative relations and liberatory practices (Cvetkovich, 2012). Not only

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is there no escape from the emotional history of the past and the present rooted in coloniality, but also the achievement of social justice and the dismantling of colonial relations have been linked in part with the need to invent new affects and affective relations (Pedwell, 2016). Hence, theorizing refusal not only as a political but also as an affective practice is valuable in turning our attention towards the production of those affective practices that could challenge colonial practices and enable decolonization. In general, affective practices are understood as forms of activity that understand and mobilize affect as a central part of practice (Wetherell, 2012). As Wetherell explains, “An affective practice is a figuration where body possibilities and routines become recruited or entangled together with meaning making and with other social and material figurations” (2012, p. 19). Through the lens of affect theory, then, all political practices are also affective ones. Viewing refusal as a form of affective practice helps us pay attention to the ways in which forms and structures of refusal come to be conceivable, how they are articulated and legitimated, and how they contribute to the reproduction or interrogation of colonial practices. The patterning of refusal as affective practice, then, is inevitably embedded within particular socio-political settings (see Breeze, 2019). Similarly, Ahmed (2004) theorizes the production of affective attachments as economies that circulate and invest in particular feelings of desire. Her analysis views emotions as cultural and political, that is, not as individual feelings residing “within” subjects and then moving outward towards objects, but rather as forms of capital “produced as an effect of its circulation” (p. 45). In affective economies, according to Ahmed, emotions are relations and they do things; in particular, emotions align individuals with communities through the very intensity of their attachments. Agathangelou, Bassichis and Spira (2008) have specifically used the notion of affective economies in reference to “the circulation and mobilization of feelings of desire, pleasure, fear, and repulsion utilized to seduce all of us into the fold of the state” and become “invested emotionally” in the “false promises” of capitalism and the empire (p. 122). For example, the desire for recognition cultivated by liberal politics is invoked as an affective economy that works through an “imperial project of promise and non-promise” (Agathangelou et al., 2008, p. 128); some are included in these promises and become complicit to the imperial regime that makes them, while others (e.g., Indigenous peoples) are systematically excluded and persistently suffer the consequences of colonization. All in all, then, theorizing refusal as an affective practice and economy helps us understand the ways in which alternative practices – e.g., Indigenous liberatory practices, as Coulthard (2014) would say – may be invoked to challenge colonial relations. Intellectual analysis and critical

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consciousness are not enough to identify how harmful colonial practices are in the field of education and beyond; these practices need to be accompanied by actions that create affective disinvestment from those desires that perpetuate coloniality, such as autonomy, certainty and accumulation of capital (Stein, 2019b). In the context of higher education, in particular, as I show next, refusal also requires the cultivation of new affective economies and practices that not only identify complicity in reproducing harmful promises and colonial effects but also establish new solidarities, commitments and possibilities for decolonization. Three Affective Modes of Decolonial Refusal in Higher Education

An analysis of different modes of refusal examines the ways in which refusal as both political and affective practices can make contributions to higher education decolonization. More importantly, this analysis could identify pedagogical spaces and practices of “affective counterpolitics” (Massumi, 2015) at the university, namely spaces and practices of decolonial refusal that invoke “hopeful criticism” (Anderson, 2017) – that is, criticism which is not merely negative but rather affirmative, creating opportunities of hope for social transformation (Zembylas, 2020a). In particular, I focus on three affective modes of decolonial refusal that emerge from McGranahan’s (2016) theorization of refusal in cultural anthropology. McGranahan, who draws on Simpson’s (2007, 2014, 2016) work, details three aspects of refusal: refusal as social and affiliative; refusal as distinct from resistance; and refusal as hopeful and wilful. I argue that these three aspects may also constitute affective modes of decolonial refusal in higher education, and I explain below how and why this is so. The first aspect, according to McGranahan (2016), is that refusal is social and affiliative. This aspect suggests that by refusing the colonial state’s structures of social and cultural organization, practices of refusal enable the production of new forms of community and relationality (Jafri, 2020). In relation to the colonial university, Grande (2018) suggests that the prospect of refusal raises a fundamental question in debates of higher education decolonization: “What kinds of solidarities can be developed among peoples with a shared commitment to working beyond the imperatives of capital and the settler state?” (pp. 59–60). Previous attempts at alliancebuilding within and across, for example, feminism, anti-war and anticapitalist movements have shown that these solidarities are also sites of power differential and struggle; hence, a question here is how affective refusal may confront some of these sticky but important issues within the higher education context. Making more explicit the link between affective refusal and solidarity, this question may be rephrased as follows: What kind of

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“affective solidarities” (Hemmings, 2012) can be developed at the university so that peoples who work on various social justice projects (e.g., antiracist and anti-capitalist projects) “stand with” (TallBear, 2014) those struggling for decolonization? To address this question, it is important first to acknowledge that there are two fundamental dimensions of promise and recognition promoted by the empire (Agathangelou et al., 2008). On the one hand, there are those peoples for whom “pleasures and rights are being forever promised […] at the expense of compliance with, or perhaps distraction from, the larger structural underpinnings of social relations and processes” (Agathangelou et al., 2008, p. 137). On the other hand, there are those for whom the same promise has not been issued, the colonized and oppressed peoples (e.g., Indigenous peoples), whose sufferings are recognized only at a superficial level. Decolonial refusal as an affective economy and practice, then, takes different trajectories for these groups. While refusal for the colonized emerges directly from conditions of dispossession and violence produced by settler colonialism, refusal for those who are privileged requires the development of a critical and affective consciousness around complicity in ongoing colonization (cf. Jafri, 2020). Decolonial refusal, therefore, is manifested differently for different groups; yet the new openings emerging have the potential to create pedagogical and political spaces at the university that could inspire anticomplicity praxes for all – that is, actions that actively refuse to commit any social harm in everyday life (Zembylas, 2020b). In other words, affective refusal may confront some of the thorny issues of solidarities across different movements by creating a common ground that refuses to sustain complicity. For example, a university instructor could be concerned with how to make students understand complicity as situated – that is, how power relations and affective infrastructures in their specific setting constellate to formulate complicity, what it would take to recognize this complicity (politically and emotionally; collectively and individually) and engage in actions that refuse to perpetuate it. The notion of refusal as social, affiliative and affective offers a productive point of departure to begin articulating the ways in which our differential affective attachments to the colonial project – our fears, desires and so on – can be mobilized to produce solidarities “not premised upon exploitation, profit, or death” (Agathangelou et al., 2008, p. 137). Hence, affective refusal in higher education can make an important contribution to solidarities and alliancebuilding, despite differential motivations to decolonial refusal. The second aspect of refusal, according to McGranahan (2016), is its distinction from resistance. As Simpson (2016, p. 330) points out, resistance “overinscribe[s] the state with its power to determine what matter[s]”.

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Approaching Mohawk refusals as both political stance and theory, Simpson (2014) argues that the concepts of resistance or recognition – which have been predominantly used in social and political theory – are insufficient to account for refusing the place of the state. Whereas resistance reaffirms the rules of engagement set by the state, refusal not only critiques them, but it also produces new rules and forms of relationality. As such, a critical and affective consciousness of refusal constitutes a form of revenge against the deep inequities and injustices that structure colonial relations (Simpson, 2016). However, as Simpson explains, “Revenge does not mean individuated harm inflicted on a perpetrator in a transaction that renders justice” but rather “avenging a prior of injustice and pointing to its ongoing life in the present” (Simpson, 2016, p. 330). It is a “refusal to let go, to roll over, to play this game” (2016, p. 330), adds Simpson. These insights are relevant to the state of neoliberal and neocolonial higher education, because they highlight not only the intellectual but also the deep affective commitment that is required for decolonial refusal. If we – educators and students, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike – are affectively invested in the status quo, that is, the empty promises or the complicity of those of us who benefit from this system, then unless we become affectively disinvested in this system, we run the risk of reproducing the colonized economies of affect “that fortify so much of conservative, liberal and even radical praxis” (Agathangelou et al. 2008, p. 137). Hence, resistance may indeed not be enough in some circumstances; refusal has to take the front seat and drive decolonization efforts in higher education. Here, then, I am extending previous discussions that recognize the affective dimensions of resistance and its educational implications (Zembylas, 2021), and I argue that educators and students in higher education need to also learn how to refuse emotional participation to all forms of colonial violence that impact us all. A point that merits some further clarification here is what to do with anti-capitalist movements calling for resistance to the neoliberal university. While such movements and their importance cannot be dismissed, my argument is that affective refusal moves a step forward compared to resistance, because it refuses to play the game of legitimating colonial structures and seeks to find new ways to dismantle its power. Needless to say, as I point out later, refusal creates space for resistance; therefore, resistance cannot be completely dismissed as a pedagogical strategy. After all, resistance and refusal are connected, as both are tactics of negation that struggle to dismantle neoliberal and neocolonial structures, albeit from different trajectories and intensities. Hence, once again, the notion of “common ground” between the two tactics may reconcile concerns whether resistance should be completely dismissed.

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Finally, the third aspect of refusal, according to McGranahan (2016), is that refusal is hopeful and wilful. This refers to how “Hope combines with will to refuse authorized anticipations” (McGranahan, 2016, p. 323), namely that which is usually expected, “thus moving away from the probable into the possible” (McGranahan, 2016, p. 323). In other words, hope is understood as an affective practice, just like refusal, that is generated, mobilized, sustained and/or transformed (Kleist & Jansen, 2016) for equality, decolonization or, simply, a better life (Coleman & Ferreday, 2010). Hence, I argue here that it is crucial for educators and students in higher education to imagine alternative ways to feel and hope that are not stuck in default negative connotations of refusal but rather speak forcefully of the desire for decolonization. In this sense, decolonial refusal is combined with hope to highlight the visions, mournings, memories, voices and spaces that have been relegated to silence as a result of coloniality. To challenge colonial relations in higher education without paying attention to the affective entanglements of refusal and hope – including their potential impact on social relations and processes – may ultimately prove unproductive as it will miss accounting for the complex ways in which these affects (and others) may be embodied differentially in different peoples and sites. The need to begin the restorative processes required to facilitate the move away from colonial relations and structures in higher education can be inspired by and oriented around the cultivation of hope that gives rise and materializes new capacities to aspire a decolonial futurity. Yet, this hope is not an empty or sentimental hope, but rather a material hope, deeply informed by the affectivity and materiality of the “land as a system of reciprocal relations and obligations” (Coulthard, 2014, p. 13, original emphasis). This radical assertion of the land in discourses and practices of refusing the university (Grande, 2018) is necessary to confront colonial relations. However, this means that the changes that need to happen at the university to become a place that reformulates the rules of engagement with the land and Indigenous peoples should not be limited to hollow performances of recognition such as routine-like territorial acknowledgements which are quickly forgotten (Daigle, 2019). These changes need to be forged as a fundamental disruption of the colonial affective logics that are manifested in all aspects of higher education – from the systems of access and management in universities, the systems of authoritative control, standardization, classification, commodification, accountancy and bureaucratization reflected in the organizational structures, the teaching methods and assessment mechanisms of students and faculty alike, the research practices and publishing norms, to the curricular content and design of courses (Mbembe, 2016). In the last part of this chapter, I will focus on one of these aspects: how to cultivate an affective ethos of refusal in higher education pedagogies.

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Pedagogies of Refusal in Higher Education Decolonization

As I have argued so far, affect is key to refuse colonial relations at the university and beyond. If it is true that our deepest desires and emotions “are tapped into for imperial production”, then it is crucial to ask “how we might organize, mobilize and form alternative intimacies and desires” (Agathangelou et al., 2008, p. 139) that embody an ethos of refusal in higher education pedagogies. But how do the affective modes of decolonial refusal mentioned earlier “translate” into an ethos of refusal in higher education pedagogies? In other words, how do refusal as social and affiliative, refusal as distinct from resistance and refusal as hopeful and wilful formulate collectively an affective ethos of refusal in higher education pedagogies? The vision of pedagogies of refusal in higher education decolonization would be nothing less than the potential to create abolitionist students and educators (Moten & Harney, 2004), who would not stop at the recognition of the harm caused by settler colonialism, but would rather move beyond recognition towards decolonial action (Rodríguez, 2019). If Spivak (2004) is right that education is “the uncoercive rearrangement of desires” (p. 526), then there is no guarantee that pedagogies of refusal will form alternative intimacies and desires; nevertheless, it is crucial to begin sketching how such pedagogies might look like. Importantly, the chapter’s aim is not to discuss the practical aspect of pedagogies of refusal, but rather to offer some reflections on how to cultivate an ethos of affective refusal in the academy. First of all, I understand pedagogies of refusal (Tuck & Yang, 2014a; Rodríguez, 2019) to be those pedagogies that empower students – many of whom experience forms of colonial violence on a daily basis and others who are complicit to this violence – to not only recognize these forms of colonial violence but also disrupt, refuse and displace them with alternative relations that affirm decolonizing imaginaries. I turn to Alexander’s (2001) definition of “pedagogies” in her book Pedagogies of Crossing, because it allows us to see how our pedagogical practices may embody an ethos of refusal. As Alexander writes: “I came to understand pedagogies in multiple ways […] as in breaking through, transgressing, disrupting, displacing, inverting inherited concepts and practices […] so as to make different conversations and solidarities possible” (p. 7). Alexander’s notion of pedagogies includes transformative teaching that compels students to think about colonial trauma and White complicity, renewed relationships with the “self” and “others” and engagements with genealogies of Indigenous peoples that break through inherited boundaries, allowing students “to ‘cross’ into future imaginings for social change” (Hanna, 2019, p. 232). Teaching the practice of refusal, write Tuck and Yang (2014a), “is unsettling both because students may first consider refusal to be undesirable, as

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failure, and also because it can feel like explaining refusal requires exposing that which ought not to be exposed” (p. 815). Although refusal is unsettling, it can also be generative, because it creates pedagogical spaces to examine that which is being refused (Rodríguez, 2019). In particular, writes Rodríguez, Refusal helps us unmask seemingly benevolent relations and the function of affect in creating institutional buy-in. Our refusal creates space for resistance to incorporation while simultaneously opening space for us to turn toward another possibility. Our refusal lets us recognize that we are each other’s possibility. Through our refusal we challenge normalized coercive violence (e.g. the capitalist reproduction of death, prisons, the dispossession of Indigenous lands). Our refusal delegitimizes that which has gained legitimacy by force. As such, our embodied refusal constitutes a decolonial potential. (2019, p. 6) Teaching the practice of decolonial refusal, then, entails the cultivation of embodied and affective refusal that challenges all forms of coercive violence. Hence, it is crucial, according to Grande (2018), to find “common ground” among parallel social justice projects that aim to undermine colonial relations and practices (e.g., anti-capitalist, anti-racist and anti-colonial projects). The “common ground” here, suggests Grande, “is not necessarily literal but rather conceptual, a corpus of shared ethics and analytics: anti-capitalist, feminist, anti-colonial. Rather than allies, we are accomplices—plotting the death but not the murder of the settler university” (2018, pp. 60–61). I have argued throughout this chapter that this common ground is, importantly, deeply affective too; teaching and learning how to become accomplices with others against all forms of violence entails the production of affective solidarities that “engage the traumas as well as the yearnings of our pasts and our futures” (Agathangelou et al., 2008, p. 139, original emphasis). Given the necessity and value of forming such affective solidarities, it would be unwise, in my view, to create a “competition” among different social justice projects or distinguish between those which are explicitly decolonial and others which are “less” so. Furthermore, attending to affect in pedagogies of refusal brings into view the micropolitical dimension through which knowledge production takes place at the university. A micropolitical dimension is a constitutive dimension of all political activity, argues Anderson (2017). Knowledge production and legitimation at the university is one such activity; teaching, which compels students to critique colonial relations and their consequences, is another. Yet, both of these activities are intertwined and

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affectively grounded. Paying attention to the micropolitics of colonial relations enables us – researchers and educators in higher education – to see how the affective segmentations of life in the classroom can be as harmful as the rigid colonial structures are (Zembylas, 2020a). In other words, it is crucial not to underestimate or, worse, to dismiss the entanglement of affective power between the micro- and the macro-political level (Protevi, 2009). For example, in the case of universities located on stolen lands – actively supportive of the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous lands (Daigle, 2019) – power works affectively and micropolitically to increase a body’s docility and achieve an affective mode of governance (Anderson in Kemmer et al., 2019). Therefore, a point of departure for pedagogies of refusal is for educators to understand how affective dynamics function micropolitically to organize, mobilize and form Indigenous and non-Indigenous students’ responses towards the issue of land dispossession and under which circumstances there can be an antidote to the affective ideology of colonial relations and practices in everyday university life. A key pedagogical question, then, is: How and with which resources can educators and their students first identify the forms of damage and harm that are reproduced by colonial relations micropolitically, and then explore different manifestations of decolonial action that would bring the desired transformations within or beyond the university? A set of relevant questions to explore with/in the university has been suggested by Stein (2020), such as the following: How can we prepare learners to work with and through the difficulties, failures, uncertainties, and anxieties that are a central part of social change, without fear? What kind of curriculum can encourage learning from feelings and experiences of discomfort, complicity, and disillusionment? (p. 225) At the same time, it is important not to demonize feelings of fear altogether, as they might be important in preparing students to engage in social change. Fear on the part of settler students, for example, can instil feelings of humility, an ethos and affect so important in terms of witnessing oneself as occupying a violent positionality. If educators in higher education want to move beyond recognitionbased practices taking shape across universities in settler colonial contexts, then pedagogies of refusal need to identify the ways that recognition-based practices perpetuate “cruel optimism” (Berlant, 2011). Cruel optimism, according to Berlant, exists “when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing” (p. 1). Affective attachment to the false

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promises of capitalism and empire involves an inclination to return to fantasies that will never fulfil the transformation people desire; this is coupled with the production of feelings of “reconciliation” as a remedy to past injustices, wrongs and sufferings of Indigenous peoples (Daigle, 2019). Pedagogies of refusal, then, can help educators and students refuse the fraught scripts of optimism and relationality that function as “containment and appeasement mechanisms” (Rodríguez, 2019, p. 6) and try to listen deeply to each other’s stories and struggles (Tuck & Yang, 2014a); and to enable non-Indigenous students to understand their own complicity and how colonial logics constrain their ability to affectively connect with Indigenous worldings and forms of knowledge (see Wright, 2018). Therefore, pedagogies of refusal in higher education are not negative, but rather affirmative practices highlighting “positive” and hopeful stories of alternative relationalities that embody the hope for decolonial futurity. All in all, pedagogies of refusal that are grounded in the affirmative elements of refusal (e.g., as social and affiliative and as hopeful and wilful) create the potential to cultivate a decolonial ethos in higher education – a much needed ethical and political orientation towards the long and difficult processes of higher education decolonization. Concluding Remarks

In this chapter, I have discussed how a politics and an affective pedagogy of refusal could provide openings in higher education to offer first a disruption of empire’s seductive promises and then a hope and desire to form new solidarities and intimacies for decolonization. Refusal, I have pointed out, invokes a vision for both a decolonizing and an affective approach that serves as public and political pedagogy, methodology and intellectual analysis within and outside the university (see Hundle, 2019). To build on Hundle’s theorization, such a pedagogy, methodology and intellectual analysis is derived from careful engagement with anti-colonial thought and its histories, theories and practices of decolonization that are based on the entanglements of the political, the intellectual and the affective. While many scholars in higher education decolonization have framed refusal as foremost a methodology, political pedagogy and intellectual analysis, I argue that its affective elements and the transformative possibilities emerging from this acknowledgement remain ignored. To this end, I suggest that it is crucial to focus on and enact pedagogies of refusal that engage with the affective (dis)investments of students and educators in colonial relations, if we are to disrupt the seductive workings of colonial power in its most intimate dimensions (Agathangelou et al., 2008).

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Amid the apparent power of the neoliberal and neocolonial university, some may argue that pedagogies of refusal are utopian, as they invoke the idea of decolonial desires. However, as la paperson (2017) reminds us: My position is impossible, a colonialist-by-product of empire, with decolonizing desires. I am, and maybe you are too, a produced colonialist. I am also a by-product of colonization. As a colonialist scrap, I desire against the assemblage that made me. This impossibility motivates this analysis, which seeks not to resolve colonialist dilemmas, but to acknowledge that they include specific machined privileges that may be put to work in the service of decolonizations. (p. xxiii) la paperson emphasizes that decolonial desires and visions are crucial in efforts to disrupt coloniality; it goes without saying that such desires by themselves will not dismantle colonial relations and structures. Yet, every position of impossibility also holds some kind of possibility; these impossibilities and possibilities coexist and are part of the potential of higher education decolonization. Crucially, decolonizing higher education is not the sole work of educators, students or administrators in universities; work outside the university is equally important. However, one major argument emerging from this chapter is that it becomes crucial to continue exploring how universities are sites of both estrangements and intimacies – that is, affective sites of struggles against coloniality. As such, an important contribution of pedagogies of refusal – within and beyond the university – is to seize the possibilities emerging for breaking down empire’s seductive promises. References Agathangelou, A., Bassichis, M. D., & Spira, T. L. (2008). Intimate investments: Homonormativity, global lockdown, and the seductions of empire. Radical History Review, 100, 120–143. Ahmed, S. (2004). The cultural politics of emotion. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press. Alexander, M. J. (2001). Pedagogies of crossing: Meditations on feminism, sexual politics, memory and the sacred. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Anderson, B. (2014). Encountering affect: Capacities, apparatuses, conditions. Aldershot: Ashgate. Anderson, B. (2017). Hope and micropolitics. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 35(4), 593–595. Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bhungalia, L. (2020). Laughing at power: Humor, transgression, and the politics of refusal in Palestine. EPC: Politics and Space, 38(3), 387–404.

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Breeze, R. (2019). Emotion in politics: Affective-discursive practices in UKIP and labour. Discourse & Society, 30(1), 24–43. Burman, J. (2016). Multicultural feeling, feminist rage, Indigenous refusal. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 16(4), 361–372. Coleman, R., & Ferreday, D. (2010). Introduction: Hope and feminist theory. Journal of Cultural Research, 14(4), 313–321. Coulthard, G. S. (2014). Red skin, white masks: Rejecting the colonial politics of recognition. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Cvetkovich, A. (2012). Depression: A public feeling. Durham: Duke University Press. Daigle, M. (2019). The spectacle of reconciliation: On (the) unsettling responsibilities to Indigenous peoples in the academy. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 37(4), 703–721. Foucault, M. (2009). Security, territory, population: Lectures at the Collége de France 1977-1978. Vol. 4. New York: Macmillan. Grande, S. (2018). Refusing the university. In E. Tuck & K. W. Yang (Eds.), Toward what justice? Describing diverse dreams of justice in education (pp. 47–65). New York: Routledge. Hanna, K. B. (2019). Pedagogies in the flesh: Building an anti-racist decolonized classroom. Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 40(1), 229–244. Hemmings, C. (2012). Affective solidarity: Feminist reflexivity and political transformation. Feminist Theory, 13(2), 147–161. Hollander, J. A., & Einwohner, R. L. (2004). Conceptualizing resistance. Sociological Forum, 19(4), 533–554. Hundle, A. K. (2019). Decolonizing diversity: The transnational politics of minority racial difference. Public Culture, 31(2), 289–322. Jafri, B. (2020). Refusal/film: Diasporic-indigenous relationalities. Settler Colonial Studies, 10(1), 110–125. Johansson, A., & Vinthagen, S. (2016). Dimensions of everyday resistance: An analytical framework. Critical Sociology, 42(3), 417–435. Kemmer, L., Peters, C. H., Weber, V., Anderson, B., & Mühlhoff, R. (2019). On right-wing movements, spheres, and resonances: An interview with Ben Anderson and Rainer Mühlhoff. Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory, 20(1), 25–41. Kleist, N., & Jansen, S. (2016). Introduction: Hope over time—Crisis, immobility and future-making. History and Anthropology, 27(4), 373–392. la paperson. (2017). A third university is possible. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Massumi, B. (2015). Q & A with Brian Massumi, by Laura Sell. Duke University Press Blog. https://dukeupress.wordpress.com/2015/08/19/qa-with-brian-massumi/ Mbembe, A. (2016). Decolonising the university: New directions. Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 15 (1), 29–45. McGranahan, C. (2016). Theorizing refusal: An introduction. Cultural Anthropology, 31, 319–325. Metcalfe, A. S. (2019). Thinking in place: Picturing the knowledge university as a politics of refusal. Research in Education, 104(1), 43–55. Moten, F., & Harney, S. (2004). The university and the undercommons: Seven theses. Social Text, 22(2), 101–115.

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Murdick, E. (2019). Sites of epistemic friction: Are decolonial desires entitled to opacity? Journal of World Philosophies, 4, 87–91. Pedwell, C. (2016). Decolonizing empathy: Thinking affect transnationally. Samyukta: A Journal of Women’s Studies, XVI (1), 27–49. Protevi, J. (2009). Political affect: Connecting the social and the somatic. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Rodríguez, Y. (2019). Pedagogies of refusal: What it means to (un)teach a student like me. Radical Teacher, 115, 5–12. Scott, J. (1985). Weapons of the weak—Everyday forms of peasant resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Seigworth, G., & Gregg, M. (2010). An inventory of shimmers. In M. Gregg & G. Seigworth (Eds.), The affect theory reader (pp. 2–25). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Simpson, A. (2007). On ethnographic refusal: Indigeneity, ‘voice’ and colonial citizenship. Junctures, 9, 67–80. Simpson, A. (2014). Mohawk interruptus: Political life across the borders of settler states. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Simpson, A. (2016). Consent’s revenge. Cultural Anthropology, 31, 326–333. Spivak, G. (2004). Righting wrongs. The South Atlantic Quarterly, 103(2/3), 523–581. Stein, S. (2017). Internationalisation for an uncertain future: Tensions, paradoxes, and possibilities. The Review of Higher Education, 41 (1), 3–32. Stein, S. (2019a). Beyond higher education as we know it: Gesturing towards decolonial horizons of possibility. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 38, 143–161. Stein, S. (2019b). Navigating different theories of change for higher education in volatile times. Educational Studies, 55(6), 667–688. Stein, S. (2020). A colonial history of the higher education present: Rethinking land-grant institutions through processes of accumulation and relations of conquest. Critical Studies in Education, 61(2), 212–228. TallBear, K. (2014). Standing with and speaking as faith: A feminist-indigenous approach to inquiry. Journal of Research Practice, 10(2), Article N17. Retrieved May 22, 2022, from http://jrp.icaap.org/index.php/jrp/article/view/405/371 Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2014a). Unbecoming claims: Pedagogies of refusal in qualitative research. Qualitative Inquiry, 20(6), 811–818. Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2014b). R-Words: Refusing research. In D. Paris and M. T. Winn (Eds.), Humanizing research: Decolonizing qualitative inquiry with youth and communities (pp. 223–247). Thousand Oakes, CA: Sage Publications. Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2018). Introduction: Born under the rising sign of social justice. In E. Tuck & K. W. Yang (Eds.), Toward what justice? Describing diverse dreams of justice in education (pp. 1–18). New York: Routledge. Weiss, E. (2016). Refusal as act, refusal as abstention. Cultural Anthropology, 31, 351–358. Wetherell, M. (2012). Affect and emotion: A new social science understanding. London: Sage. Wright, S. (2018). When dialogue means refusal. Dialogues in Human Geography, 8(2), 128–132.

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Zembylas, M. (2020a). From the ethic of hospitality affective hospitality: Ethical, political and pedagogical implications of theorizing hospitality through the lens of affect theory. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 39(1), 37–50. Zembylas, M. (2020b). Re-conceptualizing complicity in the social justice classroom: Affect, politics and anti-complicity pedagogy. Pedagogy, Culture, & Society, 28(2), 317–331. Zembylas, M. (2021). The affective dimension of everyday resistance: Implications for critical pedagogy in engaging with neoliberalism’s educational impact. Critical Studies in Education, 62(2), 211–226.

3 POPULATING THE SAVAGE SLOT Decolonizing Auto-Ethnographic Refusals in Higher Education Adam Rudder

Introduction

What sorts of refusals are possible in an organization that is essentially fuelled by refusal? In decolonizing, this chapter returns to imagination, not as active, positive or creative, but as the passive force of curiosity left in the wake of questions such as those posed by Ray Chow, already quite some time ago: “where have all the natives gone?” It wrestles with the refusals arising from the strange encounters that are exploded into a billion colonial nightmares, coalesces in the excess that is also our acquiesce, and crawls out of Hegel’s dark outside to haunt our dys/utopian visions of a future that could never be. The call for freedom or death can still be heard by those crumbling under the weight of identity politics, but we have learned now to ignore their voices, and our police take care of the rest. What sort of spectral imaginings were visited upon Hegel at his breakfast table, ruminating over the Owl of Minerva, certain of a peculiar kind of uncertainty, namely the kind that still left grasping White man in charge of a present prefaced on an impossible future. I can breathe, but I still feel suffocated. Let us acknowledge “where we are at” and how we got here. The protagonist of this chapter is an average university instructor. He is unique in the sense that his race and nationality make him a relatively new addition to the university lecture hall. It is odd; he often thinks to himself that just a few decades ago his presence as the instructor would be unusual in the Canadian classrooms in which he was educated. In fact, he can remember having only one black professor the entire length of his education. Though this little historical detail may not be first and foremost in the minds of DOI: 10.4324/9781003367314-5

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either his colleagues or the students he teaches, it is indeed top of mind for him. To those caught in the churn of progressive visions of the future, he was a sign of hope. However, the gates of the Ivory Tower are also the kind that speak of lost returns and require the sorts of acquiescence that might have the power to render all subsequent refusal performative. While standing at the gates on a trip to Ghana, he realized “no return” was much more than physical. He sometimes hears his friends and colleagues whispering that he is caught in the past. He is, in his own actuality, surrounded by voices that speak of the past in ways that could not, for him, be more present. The voices that surrounded his thoughts would never let him forget. These voices, which he had tried many times to name, had acquired the following throughout time: anxiety, trauma, mental health, street smarts, wisdom, and his favourite, “the ancestors”. He liked that “the ancestors” had a nice “ethnic ring” to it and was sure to make his very smart colleagues roll their eyes with impatience. In the following pages, I suggest that the most important forms of refusal do not happen in events and experiences that can be clearly articulated in words. Through a third-person auto-ethnographical account of teaching in Slovenia and in Canada, I will be using Michel Trouillot’s notion of the Savage slot to historicize the act of teaching as history comes to bare on my own personal experience in the classroom. I use Julia Kristeva’s conceptualization of the foreigner or the stranger to articulate the internal struggles that many former colonized teachers go through when fulfilling their obligations to an institution that has done more damage to black and brown bodies than any other colonial institution, perhaps save the military and the church. In the third section, I use a notion of the “White savage” to refuse essentialism, to highlight the fluidity of racial categories and to draw attention to the still generative nature of race as a concept. In this chapter, I problematicize refusal as a moral position that can be chosen by “good” or “bad” people. Rather, through Trouillot’s conception of the Savage slot, I hope to show that refusal is both impossible at the level phenomenological experience and inescapable in terms of structure. Voices, Ancestors and Other Kinds of “Mental Illness”

In the academia his voices warned him about, refusal need always be posed with an attentiveness to the fact that the very act of refusal itself is not passive – in plays a role in the maintaining the status quo. The voices ask, if all your dedication and sleepless nights amount to a refusal of the white male heterosexist ableist patriarchy, then why do they still frolic so freely in the halls of institutions that were designed to do their bidding? Perhaps we should not assume this. I will argue that there is indeed a risk involved in

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the social justice, equity, diversity and inclusion initiatives currently being undertaken at many post-secondary institutions throughout North America. In this chapter, I will argue that refusal, within the agonistic tradition of Western academia, serves also to reinforce the notion that the institution itself is capable of change. In this chapter, I will explore some of the ways in which “refusal” is weaponized against dissent and used to frustrate more earnest forms of engagement, not as much in what is said, but in the effect of being in the classroom as a person of colour. With each refusal, new terrains for control, conquest and domination are identified and mapped out, boxes are ticked. In fact, refusal as it manifests in the form of critique is integral to the work that academics do, in maintaining the illusion institutions that are filled with “good people” with “good intention” that are doing their best. As J. Jack Halberstam (2013) points out in the introduction to Fred Moten and Stefano Harney book The Undercommons: The path to the wild beyond is paved with refusal. In The Undercommons if we begin anywhere, we begin with the right to refuse what has been refused to you. Citing Gayatri Spivak, Moten and Harney call this refusal the “first right” and it is a game-changing kind of refusal in that it signals the refusal of the choices as offered. (p. 8) More specifically here, we begin with a refusal of “diversity initiatives” that allow dominant identities to not only continue setting the agenda but also determine the pace of trust building. We are in a crisis they say, one to which we must respond with committees, research and numbers; interestingly, those most qualified to deal with diversity1 are those very same ones whose methodologies just happen to be sanctioned by the institution that they are trying to critique. Let us begin by taking the “epistemological value” (Trouillot, 2003) of our protagonist’s voices seriously. Taking those voices seriously, as we will indeed do here, they behave a little like Julia Kristeva’s strangers, who were of course also strangers to themselves. These strangers have lost their faith in solutions and by extension in the right to refuse. As Kristeva’s (1991) points out, our strangers, the voices in our protagonist’s head, are tired of empty promises and have come to doubt entirely the capacity of dominant powerful majorities to comprehend the subtleties of the minoritarian position, commenting: “No. Those who have never lost the slightest root seem to you unable to understand any word liable to temper their point of view” (p. 18). When our protagonist surveys the room for information, there are parts of him that see only those who have been lulled to sleep by the stories of belonging that root “citizens” to the nation. When our protagonist is in

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front of the classroom, he is sure that nobody is blind to colour. As Jared Sexton (2008) points out, the fact that “‘skin color’ remains a metonym for race in the common sense indicates a general failure or refusal to engage properly with its convoluted logic” (p. 30). Our protagonist’s stranger may not be rational, strictly speaking, but is most certainly alert, observant, critical and, above all, knows that dominant identity is far too comfortable in their privilege. When our protagonist learns of the Petro loas,2 those that did not make it through the middle passages, those that were angry and recalcitrant, he imagined that he had finally found a name for the voices in his head. The voice warned that the sons and daughters of enlightenment are limited to purveying Truth (Trinh, 1989) and would always struggle to listen. Savage Pedagogue

This discussion of decolonizing pedagogy will engage the possibility of refusing methodology, for it is method that brought the Other into existence, and an earnest dedication to the “Truth” which maintains that existence. Building on Michel Trouillot’s formulation of the thematique, this section will examine the role method plays in robbing BIPOC students and educators of their voice within academic institutions. For us, this will begin with an examination of the Savage slot, and the role it has played in the construction of forms of life that are fit to be ruled. For Trouillot, the Savage slot is populated with content (Savage identity) not by descriptive analysis, but through “electoral politics”, which lends validity to certain kinds of methodology and helps to decide what kinds of statements are “acceptable” (Trouillot 2003, pp. 8–9). It is method which allows the distance required for the neutrality needed to mobilize “objectivity”. In the words of Trinh T Min-ha, “[he] who knows how to distinguish the real from the false” (Trinh 1989, 56), and can make claims to know you better than you know yourself. As Trinh (1989) suggests, the fall of big T Truth has not resulted in a serious re-evaluation of the epistemological value of native voice (Trouillot 2003), but rather a reconceptualization followed by the maintenance of authority: “As purveyor of ‘truth,’ he has moved from the absolute to the relative and now assumes the role of purveyor of ‘certain truths,’ pursuing a ‘perspectivistic knowledge’ while keeping an eye profoundly glued on ‘scientific objectivity’ as methodological goal” (p. 55). Trouillot’s “electoral politics” are based first and foremost on consensus within the centres from which it is deployed, where “anthropology” becomes a continual dialogue with its past and creates (demands) acquiescence through a series of disciplining procedures. In Trouillot’s (2003) words, electoral politics are:

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[…] the set of institutionalized practices and relations of power that influence the production of knowledge from within academe: academic filiations, the mechanisms of institutionalization, the organization of power within and across departments, the market value of publish-or-perish prestige, and other worldly issues that include, but expand way beyond, the maneuvering we usually refer to as “academic politics”. (p. 8) The aim of these procedures being, of course, to determine who has the authority to speak for whom and about what,3 and to define the methodologies and techniques with which this must be done. It is in this context where those who have been recruited to forward equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) initiatives must find the voice and the courage to speak, despite the fact that these technologies of knowledge served more often to rob the colonized of their voice, and not restore it. Disciplines then “continually expand, restrict, or modify in diverse ways their distinctive arsenal of tropes, the types of statements they deem acceptable” (Trouillot 2003, p. 8). With the assistance of Trouillot’s thematique, and more specifically his mobilization of the Savage slot as a form of life fit to be ruled, we can begin to move our interrogative eye from moral contemplations of “good” versus “bad” representation, and towards the structures that give meaning to questions of representation in the first place. Walking into a Slovenian university classroom circa 2005 in the smaller city of Nova Gorica, it occurred to our protagonist that “black” is not a thought that becomes active when entering a classroom filled with “white” faces for the first time. Blackness is a barrier separating the “you and I” in moments when the story of “we and them” becomes the flesh that is literally tearing us apart (sometimes so we can be put back together in a better way). Similarly, Trouillot’s Savage slot is an effect inscribed in flesh operating in our consciousness like a suggestion that is never clearly articulated. It was in this sense, that our protagonist, through the activity of entering the Slovenian classroom in Nova Gorica, became part of a community of Black people living in Slovenia. “Membership”, largely self-given, coalesces and perishes to a will that we can never be fully aware of. Although I speak of enclosure here, these moments of affiliation can be also very open as in the work of Kathleen Stewart (2007). Stewart articulates beautifully such events of becoming in one of the carefully constructed vignettes that together make up their book Ordinary Affect. These moments of affiliation are not rooted in blood, or land, and nor are they created solely by state power, but rather they are “[a] weirdly floating ‘we’ [that] snaps into a blurry focus” (p. 28) when “[t]he animate surface of ordinary affects rests its laurels in the banality of built environments and corporate clichés” (p. 29).

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In this sense, and the one I would like to evoke here and carry throughout this short chapter, “The ‘we’ incites participation and takes on a life of its own, even reflecting its own presence” (p. 29). The Savage slot we build here together, much as the name suggests, incites rather than determines content. The Savage slot is generative of a particular kind of “blackness” and therefore also Europeanness and always Whiteness. It works particularly well when thinking about race and racialization in Slovenia because the “savages” that exist there are a kind of pure object, a form unsullied by copious amounts of “domestic content”. The Savage slot itself is fundamentally historical and subsequently always historized, a concept Trouillot (2003) refers to as the thématique (p. 9). The Savage slot is useful for thinking through not what the Savage is but for coming to terms with the ways in which he was mobilized by Europeans to achieve certain social, political and economic goals (Trouillot 2003, pp. 22–3). The thematique shares with Said’s notion of Orientalism the idea that colonial geography is not simply descriptive but also imaginary. This “imaginative geography” is generative of the kinds of elsewhere that are also simply not here. The elsewhere becomes symbolic for all that West strives not to be. Said (1985) forwards three aspects of Orientalism: (1) a dynamic and changing relationship between Europe (and its offspring) and its Others; (2) a scientific discipline dedicated to the study of Oriental cultures and traditions; and (3) an ideology. He goes on to claim: The relatively common denominator between these three aspects of Orientalism is the line separating the Occident from Orient, and this, I have argued, is less a fact of nature than it is a fact of human production, which I have called imaginative geography. (Said, 1985, p. 90) Similarly, the Savage slot is not about the production of descriptive knowledge about colonized people; it is primarily concerned with the “human production” of the imaginary savages that are meant to fill the lands of elsewhere. In many ways, therefore, what is most interesting about the interaction between Europe and its “savage” others is that it remains useful for thinking about moments of interaction that had always already taken place even before the “white” colonizer’s encounter with the savages of their imaginary. We must keep in mind of course that proximity to the Other has never really been a requirement for knowledge about them, which was instead always generated through cultural production rather than in person interaction. It was this that led Said (1979) to argue that “[a]nyone

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who teaches, writes about, or researches the Orient—and this applies whether the person is an anthropologist, sociologist, historian, or philologist— either in its specific or its general aspects, is an Orientalist, and what he or she does is Orientalism” (p. 2). The Savage lingers out there in lands elsewhere, conjured into service predominantly to serve the needs of those who evoke him. Given that the academia has been one of the most powerful producers of the representation that informed our acquaintance with the Other, it is not surprising that classrooms have become such fraught battlegrounds for the clash of identity. The Savage slot, to mobilize a very specific variety for this chapter, does not share with other post-modern deconstructions of category a penchant for the melancholic or the nostalgia for a lost authenticity continually digressing into nihilistic forms of difference. It is active, in the sense that it allows us to position those who work for the higher education institutions that continue to fashion subjects of colonial and imperial global capitalist rule, of which anthropology is just one. Trouillot (2003) argues that anthropology as a discipline did not create the Savage. Rather, the Savage was the raison d'être of anthropology. Anthropology came to fill the Savage slot in the trilogy order-utopia-savagery, a trilogy that preceded anthropology’s institutionalization and gave it continuing coherence in spite of intradisciplinary shifts. (p. 28) What interests me in this chapter is the degree to which this gaze is “binding”, and what are the options available to us in terms of refusing this gaze. The Savage slot, all things considered, is particularly good for discussing “Blackness” in Slovenia, because it allows our protagonist, as an Afro-descendent teacher in a predominantly White European (Slovenian) context, to be situated without reifying any further his Blackness. Returning to our university classroom, on this first day the ancestors’ voice was particularly strong, which made our protagonist unusually apprehensive. During the previous week, he had taught a module on human rights to a group of high school students in a different part of the country. During his first day there, he entered the class to the sound of one over-enthusiastic student yelling, “hey nigger”; or was it “hey my nigga”? He shot back with a thoughtless, “that is professor nigger to you”, but a few things lingered with him. First, he hated saying the word because in his Canadian English saying nigga was extremely difficult without making very apparent the effort it took to produce. It wasn’t natural. An American friend once joked that hearing him say nigger made him wince and that he

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was always looking for the white man who had said it. In either case, the second part of this moment was trying to determine whether or not the student had used an r of the hard or soft type. Ambiguities aside, our protagonist had a choice in that moment, to see this outburst as either: the product of a young man overburdened with the weight of trashy American media misrepresentations of people of African descent, or as a Slovenian white nationalist supremacist bent on making his first day as difficult as possible. It would not be that unusual for the student to be aggressively nationalist, instances of aggressive Slovenianness are always lurking, as they are in any nationalist project. In theorizing the Savage slot as it operates in connection to this chapter’s problematization of refusal, it is important to note, that the Savage slot is not necessarily reserved for Black and Brown bodies. In the next section, I discuss how the idea of a white savage can complicate essentialist constructs of savage and move it onto the structural functions of the thematique. White Savages

In fact, representing Slovenes as “white” is problematic. In the Western mythology of the Balkans, Slovenes were a kind of savage white, striving for a form of Western whiteness that becomes most real when it is presenting itself as exclusive. In reality, the native is always someone’s native. The way that Western Europe has often imagined “the Balkans” is problematic structurally in ways very similar to “the Orient” and is therefore open to the same kind of critique that was activated by Said’s concept of Orientalism. Scholars of the Balkans have coined the term “Balkanism” to interrogate the ways in which “the Balkan” was constructed by Western Europe to achieve certain cultural and geopolitical goals. Maria Todorova (1997) argues that “‘Balkanization’ not only had come to denote the parcelization of large and viable political units but also had become a synonym for a reversion to the tribal, the backward, the primitive, the barbarian” (p. 3). Milica Bakic-Hayden (1995) uses the term “nesting orientalisms” to highlight the ways in which geographical boundaries shifted throughout history in the Balkans more as a reflection of political affiliations rather than geography. She suggests that cultures and ideologies within the region have “valorized dichotomy between east and west, and have incorporated various ‘essences’ into the patterns of representation used to describe” (BakićHayden, 1995, p. 917). Key for the story we are developing here is how this conception of intrinsic qualities of backwardness is used to map the “primitive” on a hierarchal scale. In this dichotomy, South-Eastern Europe, in some senses given its proximity to the Orient, was considered “backward”, and as a result was associated with those traits that would

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commonly be attributed to India or Africa: exotic, mystic, superstitious, violent, and so forth. Balkan “backwardness” is associated with a primordial proclivity towards violence, in which even Nazism can be demonized as somehow associated with the Southern Slavic world (Jezernik, 2003). In Robert Kaplan’s (2005) travel narrative, themes of Balkanism can be witnessed in passages such as these: “Nazism, for instance, can claim Balkan origins. Among the flophouses of Vienna, a breeding ground of ethnic resentments close to the southern Slavic world, Hitler learned how to hate so infectiously” (p. 10). In fact, all those uncivilized qualities that helped to build the European notion of civilized and therefore superior can also be found in the characterization of “Balkan” as an essential category. Which is to say that the Savage slot is not always limited to Black and Brown bodies and can also be populated by forms of whiteness as well. In any case, our protagonist was in the classroom that day to speak about race and postcolonial theory, to a people who, by in large, had very few experiences with North American style processes of racialization, which served as his foundation for approaching this theory. However, the fact that they were unfamiliar with North American style racism did not in any way mean that European racial hierarchies were unfamiliar to them, and our protagonist was well aware of this fact. To what extent would the university students he was about to lecture be satisfied by his rendition of the Savage, for example? He had to be mindful of lending himself to unsavoury stereotypes that were already being proliferated by the media. If he did not “come off smart”, he could inadvertently reinforce the notion that “black people” were intellectually less well endowed. What novel content for the Savage slot would his presence create? Nova Gorica is situated on the border with Italy’s more well-known city with the same name, Gorica. At some point the city had been split into two nations, leaving remnants of the former on either side of fictional line made real by the guns the border guards carried. Slovenia had been part of socialist Yugoslavia, and the students in the class that day were descendants of those raised in a Marxistinspired system where racism just “didn’t exist”. Our protagonist, hired originally to provide intercultural training in English to Slovenian primary and secondary students, wondered at how he was seen. His thoughts often returned to his own history as a Caribbean, and the stories he had been told about how his ancestors had come to learn European languages. His father told stories of the slave traders who would remove an African’s tongue for speaking the language of their mother. A couple of hundred years later, he arrived in Slovenia to teach English and Canadian culture to a bunch of primary, secondary and university students in Slovenia. He wondered if the “white” students in the class, predominantly a kind of problematic Balkan whiteness that was nonetheless never quite white enough, felt as though

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they had drawn the short straw getting a Black Canadian to represent Canada. In 2004 when he arrived, Johnny Young’s appointment as the first Black US ambassador to Slovenia was just coming to a close. He remembered feeling an odd sense of pride at their shared racial heritage, but also wondering if Slovenian’s had taken this as an insult, getting a Black representative of the most powerful country in the world, and one known for its long and nefarious history of anti-black racism. The n-word was still freshly ringing in his head as he walked up to introduce himself. Along with the words of that young man who had yelled out that rather unusual welcome, came the voices of his ancestors who chastised him for thinking that any white person, Balkan or not, were interested in hearing about how racist they were. Days before he had spoken with a mixed Slovenian, of both Madagascarian and Slovene descent, and her words were also fresh in his head: Slovenes are very concerned with being polite and not offending anyone. Because of this, I think that no Slovene actually wants to be a racist, or to have others think of them as racist, even though they still think of Africans being lazy, poor, unintelligent, and ill, mostly due to how they are represented in the media. With Trouillot’s concept of the savage slot ever present in his consciousness, the voice in his head (ancestors) was quickly becoming the voice of anxiety laced with anger. If it has not already become obvious, this refusal is fundamentally rooted in a problematization of the ability to be seen, and therefore understood, incorporated and/or managed. And given the role that nationalism has played in the very foundation and origins of the classroom, it would be no surprise to also find very exuberant expressions of these problematic senses of belonging at play in all of our teaching and learning environments. The question then became: What role was he playing in populating the savage slot for his students? Even if the nigger-yelling student was malicious, he had been called the “n word” in class before; the first time was at once less ambiguous in terms of intent, and also far more acceptable in terms of context. When the protagonist was a student in high school, they still had this spirit building event day called slave day. As it was being discussed, one very confident white student yelled out, “yeah, buckwheat day”. The sad part was that the little white man knew more about that history than our protagonist’s well-educated father was willing to share with a child. In fact, the protagonist’s father had insisted that Canada was racism free, or at least free of any kind of racism that matter. His father had a perfect answer for all inquiries

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that arose from what our protagonist understood as racially motivated. The father’s response to all such inquiries went something like this: “that’s not racism, racism is when you can’t swim at the white only beach”. Despite the fact that he had taught Malcolm X to students at local Douglas College (as our protagonist would learn years later), his father refused to have “that conversation” with him. His father had accepted the fact that white people would need to be dragged kicking and screaming into the future, and there was nothing for us to do now but accept the 10% discount on our achievements just for being black and simply move on. The protagonists ancestral voice, in moments, had a lot in common with his father. In the high school classroom that day, however, it started with buckwheat day and quickly grew into something more readily identifiable as racist. As the murmur become a low rumbling discussion, other words joined the fray, like “jiggaboo day”, “coon day” and of course the infamous “nigger day” or “nigger for a day”. As the teacher was getting things under control, one well-intended boy approached our protagonist carrying a look of concern (there is always a saviour): “You know”, he said in a hushed voice, “you know, that John kid, shouldn’t call you a nigger”. “Why not?” our protagonist replied, having no idea what nigger, coon, or jiggaboo meant. You see, part of our protagonist’s father’s project, sometimes also referred to as lightening the line, which might appear nefarious in hindsight, was to raise his children with no memories of the ships that brought them to this new land. He had this somewhat convincing story about being a global citizen and about the need to leave the past in the past. The young white boy who had come to our protagonist’s aid looked perplexed. “What do you mean why not?” his look conveyed. What is a nigger? our protagonist asked… On that day, the voice was born. It started as a warmth in his stomach, an affective bodily response that told our protagonist that something wasn’t quite right. He would later ask the adults around him what all this talk of slavery actually meant for him. Given most had been robbed of the wits to have a basic conversation with a child about slavery, race and identity politics, due to what can only be described as an act of wilful ignorance, he found the answers he was looking for in books. As his knowledge grew, the voice in his head became more articulate, and bolder. When he was called upon to talk about race or was called some kind derogatory name, the voice came on so strong it made his tongue turn to glue in his mouth.

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The voices raged all through high school, and as he gradually began to find the words to articulate those thoughts and feelings to others, he also came to the realization that some of his insights might be worth sharing. In the Canada of his youth, they had no right to refuse racism because racism did not exist. As in the socialist version, only ignorance actually existed, and all these petty grievances due to race, gender, sexuality, ability and so on would disappear as everyone become either rich or the proletariat. Enlightenment modernization theory, for all its variants, agreed that reason and productivity would fix all the broken and unproductive things. When he entered the classroom, nobody was blind to his colour. There have certainly been many moments in which he wished he could refuse the sorts of characteristics that might be associated with his colour but controlling the way in which his students and colleagues saw and “understood” him was out of his control. On the occasion in question, he sought to problematize the student’s lazy reading of him in the introduction. He explained to curious-looking students that he was in fact Canadian, not American, and then referenced his Canadian university education that he hoped might support the notion that his proceeding discussion about racism and human rights was not just the rantings of an angry Black man looking for excuses. Inevitably they would want to know where he was “really from”, or in other words, why his skin was “black” or more accurately brown. It was interesting to him that students didn’t necessarily have a concept of Black that was connected to Africa the continent; they wanted to know how he was Canadian and not white. In response to this thinly veiled question, he would respond, “how many of you are racist?” No one put up their hand. “How many of you were aware of my skin colour when I entered the classroom?” A few students put up their hands. What was more interesting here was that when he was teaching in elementary school, all the grade 5 children put their hands up. They had not quite learned that seeing colour was racist yet. “What would you say if I told you I was white?” He would then go on to explain to them that in fact, he had much more “white” biology and culture than he did ‘“black”. He was raised in a white suburb with two white parents with very little exposure to so called “black” culture. Rudder, the name he inherited from his father, was actually inherited from his great grandfather who was white. So even on his father’s side, there existed a smattering of “white biology”. In fact, until he arrived at university, he explained, his predominant experience of being black in the world had come from white racism. It came from sometimes awkward and more often times hateful white glances in the suburbs and small towns of British Columbia, where he was raised. Blackness was not racial or cultural for him so much as it was a barrier to full participation in whiteness.

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By No Means a Conclusion

What we seek here is to destabilize the notion that individuals such as our protagonist can simply “get a grip” and put the past in the past. The sort of radical historicization made possible through Trouillot’s critique of the Western thématique provides avenues through which to occupy the elsewhere unashamed, right here in the class. Our protagonist is, in fact, the elsewhere that quite literally could not be closer to here. Savage slot is read here primarily as the destabilization of metanarratives regarding who we are and how we came to be. A current that has remained strong throughout the process of Western identity formation is a particular notion of progress based on the utopia-savage couplet that functioned until the 19th century as a single slot (Trouillot, 2003, p. 17). According to Trouillot (2003), “the symbolic transformation through which Christendom became the West structures a set of relations that necessitate both utopia and the Savage” (p. 15). As dystopia replaces utopia, and the Savage walks the halls of universities everywhere, we need more than just refusal to map outside of the progressive narrative. In this sense, I am putting forward refusal not as a moral position that assumes a fully formed and coherent refuser; but rather, refusal is the act of just simply living itself. Being a racist is not simply a moral position; it is not good or bad. As I have tried to show in this short chapter, refusal is not a hill we stake out, conquer and resolve to die upon. The refusal cannot be tweeted; likewise, there are no perfectly frameable Instagram moments that capture the essence refusal. It is just the thing that happens when we hold our breath and jump into the darkness without calculating the risks. As Kathleen Stewart alluded to earlier in this chapter, refusal emerges when we smash into one another during the course of our everyday acts of trying to be ourselves. At times, refusal can take the form of a young white student extending a hand of friendship in a moment where it might cost him to do so. This chapter considered a couple of ways in which the presence of black bodies in the classroom can become a form of refusal, just as much as they signal a kind of acquiesce. In the elsewhere that could not be more here we are, in the very act of living, the refusal we seek to articulate. Notes 1 By those most qualified, I mean those whose expert knowledge on the topic of diversity has been “approved”. This is fundamentally a question of authority: who gets to speak for whom and about what. More specifically, I am thinking the university-educated professional managerial class, whose research and knowledge acquisition practices have been groomed, supported and approved of by the academia in the form of degrees, titles and accolades.

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2 In the chapter “The New World Answer to New World Need”, in Maya Deren’s book Divine Horsemen, she discusses the importance of the Petro rites in Haitian Vodou. Petro mobilized or were mobilized in the Haitian revolution to overcome the tyranny of slavery. Although Petro are sometimes casted as “evil”, Deren (1953) suggests otherwise: Petro was born out of this rage. It is not evil; it is the rage against the evil fate which the African suffered, the brutality of his displacement and his enslavement. It is the violence that rose out of that rage, to protest against it. It is the violence that rose out of that rage, to protest against it. It is the crack of the slave-whip sounding constantly, a never/to/be/forgotten, in the Petro rites. It is the raging revolt of the slaves against the Napoleonic forces. And it is the delirium of their triumph. For it was the Petro cult, born in the hills, nurtured in secret, which gave both the moral force and the actual organization to the escaped slaves who plotted and trained, swooped down upon the plantations and led the rest of the slaves in the revolt that, by 1804, had made of Haiti the second free colony in the western hemisphere, following the United States. Even today the songs of revolt, of “Vive la liberté”, occur in Petro ritual as a dominant theme. (p. 62) 3 This notion of authority will become particularly important during our discussion of auto-ethnography. My basic claim with regard to auto-ethnography, and the reason why I have chosen a different trajectory for my own personal reflections on working with Afro-Slovenes, will be that auto-ethnography, in its attempts to develop a “methodology”, potentially lends itself to one of the most contentious aspects of anthropology-rooted scientific objectivity.

References Bakić-Hayden, M. (1995). Nesting orientalisms: The case of former Yugoslavia. Slavic Review, 54(4), 917–931. https://doi.org/10.2307/2501399 Harney, S., & Moten, F. (2013). The undercommons: Fugitive planning & black study (1st ed.). Autonomedia. Jezernik, B. (2003). Wild Europe. Saqi Books. Kaplan, R. D. (2005). Balkan ghosts: A journey through history (Reprint ed.). Picador. Kristeva, J. (1991). Strangers to ourselves (L. S. Roudiez, Trans.; Reissue ed.). Columbia University Press. Said, E. W. (1979). Orientalism. Vintage. Said, E. W. (1985). Orientalism reconsidered. Cultural Critique, 1, 89–107. Sexton, J. (2008). Amalgamation schemes: Antiblackness and the critique of multiracialism. University of Minnesota Press. Stewart, K. (2007). Ordinary affects. Duke University Press. Todorova, Maria N. (1997). Imagining the Balkans. Oxford University Press. Trinh, T. M.-H. (1989). Woman, native, other: Writing postcoloniality and feminism. Indiana University Press. Trouillot, M.-R. (2003). Global transformations: Anthropology and the modern world (1st ed.). Palgrave Macmillan.

4 REFUSING HIGHER EDUCATION Vivacide and the Economies of Dissipation P. Taylor Webb

Refusing Higher Education: Vivacide and the Economies of Dissipation I’m in favor of a true cultural combat in order to teach people again that there is no conduct that is more beautiful, that, consequently, deserves to be considered with as much attention as suicide. One should work on one’s suicide all one’s life.1 – Michel Foucault

This chapter argues that refusal is a political tactic related to death and dying. Hunger strikes and acts of self-immolation illustrate this idea. The reason for developing this point is to recuperate refusal from similar ideas of “resistance”, a politic often practised as a precursor to neoliberal efforts to reform higher education (Ball & Collet-Sabé, 2022; Webb & Mikulan, 2021). The absence of death (including the absence of the threat of death, e.g., hunger strikes), I argue, co-opts refusal into a manageable politics coextensive with colonial and neoliberal efforts to reform the university. My conception of vivacide rests on a conception of refusal as quotidian dissents of coloniality (Murray, 2022). These “everyday refusals” of higher education reinterpret ideas of death, whereas death is not absolute or final, but “coextensive with life and as something made up of a multiplicity of partial and particular deaths” (Deleuze, 1988, p. 95). For example, Maes-Jelinek (1976) noted that “partial deaths are followed by partial rebirths as fragments of experience are understood and assimilated” (p. 14). Esmeir (2007) noted the “partial death of human relationships that Palestinian society” has endured through its colonial existence (p. 248). DOI: 10.4324/9781003367314-6

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Khanna (2008) and Paunksnis (2010), respectively, examined the partial deaths of Algerian and Indianian motherhood when rearing children within the colonial practices and understandings of the feminine. Caciola (1996) noted that many cultures have historically conceived of death as something partial and particular, whereas “… one could die a partial death – that is, a death of the personality without a death of the body …” (p. 7).2 The partial deaths that characterize vivacides provide an immanent understanding to ideas about living, whereas death and life are coextensive with each other rather than understood as mutually exclusive binaries (Deleuze, 1988). The immanence of partial deaths resonates with Agamben’s (2000) development of zoë (bare life) and bios (politically qualified life), but insist on “the radical impossibility of establishing hierarchies and separations. The plane of immanence…functions as a principle of virtual indetermination…[and] in passing through one another, cannot be told apart” (Agamben, 2000, p. 233). Vivacides are intentional acts that commit a partial death. For the purposes of this collection, vivacides are evidenced in the quotidian refusals of the onto-epistemologies of higher education in efforts to sustain an anticolonial life. Importantly, vivacides are practised on conceptions of death that are partial and immanent, whereas suicides are committed on transcendental understandings of life and death. In political terms, the immanence of vivacide treats partial deaths as an increased political resource for refusal, whereas suicide treats life and death as a zero-sum resource or a one-time use. Vivacide, then, can be contrasted to suicide as an absolute refusal, and often exemplified through the “spectacular” practices of selfimmolation. Even though partial deaths are considered an increased political resource, vivacide does not treat partial deaths as an infinite resource. I discuss refusal’s ultimate exhaustion later in the chapter. Vivacide is obviously aligned with Foucault’s (2007) notion of counterconduct, which identifies how forms of control are constituted and, more importantly, develops refusals to such forms of control. In his words, Foucault described counter-conduct as practices designed to “not being governed like that and at that cost” (Foucault, 2007, p. 45). The immanence of vivacide, however, alters the “cost” incurred when refusing, and in ways that are different to the absolute cost of suicide suggested in the epigraph. When committing vivacide, the colonized subject accepts a partial death in relation to the fluctuating economies governing neoliberal universities and its capacity to reintegrate partial deaths back into its colonial operations. In the end, vivacide’s success depends on the extent to which disinvestments from the onto-epistemologies of higher education also refuse from the very conditions of educational neoliberalism and divest from its normative forms of political participation evidenced in the constant calls to “reform”, “improve” or “change” the university.

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Organization

This chapter is theoretical and speculative, and proceeds in three moves. First, I review ideas of refusal, and then discuss its formulation as a differentiated practice determined to thwart governing attempts of higher education. Next, I provide an Indigenous re-reading of death by highlighting the role of self-immolation in postcolonial politics alongside a discussion of Indigenous suicidology. These literatures argue that refusals are self-depriving acts designed to produce ruptures in a colonial life. I examine some of the efficacies that suicide – as refusal – is premised upon. I discuss how Indigenous practices of silence and humour attempt to avoid being co-opted back into the very conditions of coloniality, including requests coloniality makes to normative forms of political participation (e.g., dialogue and negotiation). Following this, I discuss my idea of vivacide in relation to broader economies of dissipation, including economies of necropolitics. I pay particular attention to how educational refusals can be reintegrated (co-opted) into higher education. Vivacide, then, assists understanding how refusal operates within disproportionate economies of power and violence that sustain the colonial and neoliberal onto-epistemologies of higher education. I conclude by discussing my position, thinking through what refusal means to me, as a non-Indigenous, cisgendered, heterosexual, White educator living and working on stolen land and committed to the complex tasks of decolonization. Refusal, Refusals of Higher Education and Refusals of Coloniality

Refusal as a political tactic is an idea with a rapidly growing history. Examples include assembly (Butler, 2015), counter-conduct (Foucault, 2007), parrhesia (Peters, 2003), anti-colonial escape (Deleuze & Guattari, 1977; Koerner, 2011), colonial and neoliberal fugitivity (Harney & Moten, 2013), and an array of different divestitures and disinvestments from colonial-libidinal subjectivities (Fanon, 1967; Glissant et al., 1973; Wynter, 2005). Culp (2022) discussed refusal as a contemporary guerrilla practice practised across asymmetrical forms of power depending on one’s location within different and overlapping control societies, including (a) anonymity from colonial surveillance, (b) criminality derived from sexual queerness and, (c) fugitivity as a suspended and exhaustive state of racial captivity. For purposes of this particular collection, refusal no longer imagines education as an emancipatory mechanism, tool or practice (C.f., Freire, 1993). Rather, the university is to be refused. As such, refusal has been discussed as a general concept and praxis in and against higher education (McGranahan, 2016) and, specifically, as a concerted practice against neoliberal schooling (Ball, 2015). Refusal has recently been taken up “within, against, and

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beyond the university-as-such” (Grande, 2018, p. 51). For instance, Zembylas (2021) emphasized that the politics of refusal are intertwined with both colonial and neoliberal rationalities when they defined refusal as a “political ethos and praxis” that “denies, resists, reframes, and redirects colonial and neoliberal logics…” (p. 954). Zembylas (2021) remarked that “refusal is a kind of “disinvestment” from certain rules and relations (Bhungalia, 2020) such as those that enable colonialism and an “affirmative investment” (Weiss, 2016, 352) to possibilities that invoke decolonization” (p. 954). As such, refusal has a significant role in Indigenous studies (Coulthard, 2014; Simpson, 2016; Zemblyas, 2021). The idea of colonial refusal contains numerous references to ideas about divestitures, divestments, depropriations and disinvestments. The queer theory of Calvin Warren (2015), for example, argued that it is a “queer theory that is organized around various forms of rejection, or divestiture” (p. 24, my emphasis). Tuck and Yang (2012) noted that “[s]trategies of internal colonialism, such as … divestment … are both structural and interpersonal” (p. 5, my emphasis). Glissant (1973) noted that refusals of coloniality are “almost uniformly lived as depropriation”, or the everyday declinatures of coloniality coextensive with sustaining an anti-colonial life (p. 66, as quoted by Daily, 2015, my emphasis). Finally, Sylvia Wynter (2005) argued that a complete refusal and “divestment” from dogmatic images of human were needed for any anticolonial moment. As I will argue, intersubjective divestments, divestures and de-propriations are processes linked to partial deaths, and illustrate how refusal is both an interpersonal and an economic formulation (Fanon, 1967). Educational refusals (i.e., refusals of education) are political tactics designed to dismantle the colonial onto-epistemologies of the university and its concomitant neoliberal modes of production. Refusals of higher education, then, do double-work. They are a conscious “disinvestment” from colonial relations (Zembylas, 2021) and a coterminous divestment from neoliberal subjectivities and the concomitant subjectivities of the enterprising academic (Ball, 2015). Specifically, refusals of higher education are libidinal disinvestments from the enterprising and desiring figure of homo economicus (Ball, 2015; Brown, 2015; Webb & Mikulan, 2021), and includes disinvestments from the onto-epistemologies demanded by colonialism (Fanon, 1967; Glissant, 1973; Wynter, 2005). Refusing higher education in this sense means unlearning the dangerous and harmful legacy of colonization, particularly the racist ideas that Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) people are inferior to White Europeans. It entails interrogating and dismantling ‘power structures that carry legacies of racism, imperialism, and colonialism’. (Mintz, 2021, n.p.)

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Insofar as vivacide is practised against attempts at control (e.g., neo-colonialism), refusals of higher education can be distinguished from other refusals as a broad thanatology of personal divestments from colonial onto-epistemologies that sustain neoliberal university practices.3 For instance, Grosfoguel’s (2013) situates the knowledge structures of the Western university in epistemicide, or “the extermination of knowledge and ways of knowing” (Grosfoguel, 2013, p. 74). Similarly (but with a significant difference), Warren (2015) coined onticide to denote the impossibility of refusal when agentic positions have been eliminated a priori. Warren (2015) provides the example of the queer black that operates continuously in an already foreclosed set of ontologies and suspended set of refusals. For my purposes, refusals of higher education relate to the politics involved with subjugated knowledges (Foucault, 1980), and can be understood as an anticipatory set of politics designed to produce an “insurrection of [subjugated] knowledges”, “capable of opposition and of struggle”, and used “tactically” in order to challenge “the centralising powers linked to the institution and functioning of an organised scientific discourse” (Foucault, 1980, p. 84). Interestingly, insofar as refusals are political acts, they may or may not be educative acts. For instance, a public assembly may raise awareness of an issue, thereby constituting an act of public pedagogy. Or, it may be the case that public refusals are immediately co-opted and re-invested back into colonial, biopolitical and neoliberal discourses (Murray, 2022). So-called “post-truth” politics and “knowledge-deniers” (e.g., climate science denial) signal a mutation of educational refusal into sophisticated forms of petulance which substantially alter claims to truth made by universities and others (Peters, et al., 2018). Next, I discuss examples of refusal connected to death and dying. My goal is to distinguish how refusal is coterminous with life and death as both partial (i.e., vivacide) and complete, or final (i.e., suicide). I develop some of the thanatologies associated with educational vivacides, and discuss how divestments from the onto-epistemologies of higher education are disproportionate acts for historically marginalized groups when performed within asymmetrical economies of power and violence (Culp, 2022). Self-Immolation and Indigenous Suicidology

Acts of self-immolation represent a threshold of refusal. Such acts are evidenced in a host of anti-colonial politics, and usually premised upon an anticipated set of political catalysts intended to enact virtual conditions. Kaku (2020) explained:

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[t]he political work of self-immolation takes place through spectacular pain, material degradation, and the interaction between the body of the self-immolator, public space, and multiple audiences. This work does not end with death: by demanding contestation and/or commemoration, these burnt corpses have political lives which exceed those of the self-immolators. … self-immolation is not only a destructive act but can be a productive and future-oriented mode of politics. (p. 573) Self-immolations denote a strong form of refusal, often characterized as suicide by Western audiences. However, such characterizations neglect important insights about death and dying from Indigenous studies, and particularly from Indigenous suicidology studies. Rather than understanding the deaths produced in refusal as a moment of finality, these death are understood as an affirmative and productive moment of a life (Ansloos & Peltier, 2022; Kaku, 2020). It is, in the words of Vila-Matas (1994), the consideration of a “worthy death and … in a daring way as a protest for so much stupidity and in the fullness of passion … to [not] be dissolved obscurely with the flowing of the years” (p. 11).4 In this sense, refusal acknowledges, even anticipates, death in exchange for another set of conditions. Indigenous suicidology extricates Indigenous ideas of death and dying trapped in Western ideas of psychopathology. Ansloos and Peltier (2022) discussed Indigenous suicidology in relation to forms of necropolitics that subjugates communities to unliveable conditions in which they are continually exposed to violence and deprived of conditions necessary to live adequately. They argued: [s]uicide can be better understood by seriously attending to misery and unlivability. As a theory of suicide, this moves us beyond the disintegrating framing of suicidality as a mere cognitive state or psychological vulnerability, toward an integrated concept of debility and necro-politics. In this rendering, suicidality is what happens to a mind and body enacted upon by a particular set of colonial logics. In a world which diminishes the dignity and embodied sovereignty of Indigenous peoples, suicide is an exit from structural misery. Similarly, Tisha and polanco (2022) discussed decolonial suicidology as a “… reconfiguration of our bodies, life, and death within hospitable pluriversal worlds of co-existence, hence detached from modernity’s euro-suicide” (p. 124). For Tisha and polanco (2022), Indigenous suicidology reclaims ideas of death and dying and constitutes a “refusal of the cuerpo-mente-espíritucorazón to kill its otherworldly saberes in order to belong …” (p. 133).

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Refusal as Necropolitics and Necroresistance

“Worthy deaths” are strong forms of refusal and relate, if not respond, to Achille Mbembe’s idea of necropolitics, or the “subjugation of life to the power of death” (p. 39). Necropolitics highlights a modality of power that functions in spaces of exception, a power whose logic is extermination. Necropower subjugates populations to unliveable conditions in which they are continually exposed to violence and deprived of proper conditions. Much like the idea of partial deaths, necropolitics posits perpetual states of “death-in-life” (p. 21). In their discussion of an Indigenous suicidology, Ansloos and Peltier (2022) argued that “[t]o invite Indigenous people to endure living, we must make the world better. Failing to do so while necessitating prevention of death is a necropolitic” (p. 116). They continued: the necropolitics of settler colonialism, which by virtue of the structural arrangements of the state, denies both the sovereignty to live a flourishing life and seeks to deny the right to end the condition of misery of living in uninhabitable worlds - or what we frequently call suicide. Recognizing structural drivers of suicide is a step in the direction of materiality, and the ways that suicide and suicidality are actualized in response to palpable circumstances and destruction that lie outside of the body. (p. 111) For Ansloos and Peltier (2022), suicide is not an individual psychopathology often portrayed by Western science. Rather, it is a direct intervention into the governing practices of necropolitics and a concerted “practice of decolonization” (p. 114). Bargu (2016) theorized the idea of “necroresistance” as a praxis “based not on the affirmation of life but on its willful destruction” (p. 27). Like Ansloos and Peltier (2022), the voluntary practice of death – partial or otherwise – is able to “turn biopolitics against itself” (p. 69). In this sense, “necroresistance tears the body out of the slow and steady disciplinary management of the state and uses its imbrication in networks of power to contest these very relations” (Kaku, p. 581). Summary

Self-immolations signal how death is involved when refusing a colonial life, and, simultaneously, it is coextensive with enacting an anticipated or virtual political life.5 Acts of suicide mark “the refusal to accept the limits that the [colonial] fear of death would have the subject respect” (Mbembé, 2003, p. 16). Indigenous suicidology captures ideas about how death and

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life are conceived as a political resource (and particularly as a zero-sum game). Indigenous suicidology involves estimations of refusal’s power to productively generate alternative, decolonized lifeworlds – an insurrection of subjugated knowledges. The partial deaths involved with vivacide also treat life and death as an increased political resource. However, vivacides operate on the basis of an immanent conception of death and life, but, importantly, not an infinite resource. This point is noted in relation to educational fatigue and exhaustion which I discuss in just a moment. While self-immolation denotes a powerful example of refusal, it is likely a poor example of potential action that educators and academics would likely use. Next, I discuss the quotidian practices of vivacide. Quotidian refusals of coloniality assist understanding how vivacide operates within multiple economies of power and violence, including the colonial ontoepistemologies in higher education. I pay particular attention to how partial deaths not only increase political resources for vivacide but also increase chances for these acts to be reintegrated (co-opted) into neoliberal educational systems through entrepreneurial acts of resistance. Indigenous Silence and Humour: Anticipating the Probability of Co-Opting Refusals

Melville’s character Bartleby is a good example of quotidian refusal. Bartleby responds to all requests with the enigmatic phrase I would prefer not to. After a few weeks of refusing all tasks, Bartleby ultimately dies (as the result of refusing to eat). The point of the story is not the impact of hunger strikes (another form of refusal), but rather, the slow accretion of partial deaths. Deleuze (1997) noted how refusal undermines the very conditions of coloniality itself. Deleuze (1997) described Bartleby’s refusals as “the formula”, whereas both the phrase and act of I would prefer not to are devastating because it eliminates the preferable just as mercilessly as any nonpreferred. It not only abolishes the term it refers to, and that it rejects, but also abolishes the other term it seemed to preserve, and that becomes impossible. In fact, it renders them indistinct: it hollows out an ever-expanding zone of indiscernibility or in determination between some non-preferred activities and a preferable activity. All particularity, all reference is abolished (p. 71). Fitz-Henry (2016) argued similarly, whereas some Indigenous groups practice forms of anti-colonial refusal based on ideas of silence. Fitz-Henry argued that silence refuses the very conditions of coloniality and the implicit requests coloniality makes to normative forms of political participation (e.g., dialogue and negotiation). Fitz-Henry (2016) argued that “[s]ilence … is both a provocative refusal of the political status quo and a kind of haunting place-holder, reminding viewers of that which could be radically other-wise” (p. 14).

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Indigenous practices of silence account for the double-work of refusal, including the colonial systems on which colonial onto-epistemologies are reproduced and eventually negotiated and “reconciled”. It does so to avoid refusal from becoming co-opted back into neoliberal systems of meaning and signification. In this sense, silence “… abolishes the term it refers to, and that it rejects, but also abolishes the other term it seemed to preserve …” (Deleuze, 1997, p. 71). Similarly, Wright (2018) observed that “[r]efusal, then, becomes not only a withdrawal from dialogue but at once an important way to resist, redirect, and refuse colonial and capitalist logics” (p. 130). According to Fitz-Henry (2016), Indigenous silence is a gambit that, while disavowing colonial systems of meaning and signification, may accelerate partial deaths associated from non-participation. For instance, educational refusal, figured as a “disinvestment”, could be a refusal of a colonial epistemology, thereby occluding a future job opportunity. The disinvestment of a colonial epistemology, then, is a kind of “occupational death”. Similarly, Bhungalia (2020) argued that Indigenous practices of humour are quotidian “disinvestments” from colonial relations which subvert the very conditions of coloniality (p. 390). According to Bhungalia (2020), Indigenous humour “… is to refuse that power authorizing force. Refusal denies authority presumed and in so doing, reconfigures the relationship between dominated and subjugated itself” (p. 389). For Bhungalia (2020), through humour, “… power is not opposed but disavowed. This disavowal is also productive: it is to assert that other political orders and possibilities exist” (p. 387). Like silence, the partial deaths acquired through Indigenous humour are practised within an anticipated set of political parturitions. Bhungalia (2020) noted that “humor fosters conditions for disinvestment. Here, we can see the radical potentiality of humor. The detachment from what is opens up sensibilities and potentialities for a future unmoored from the constraints of the present” (p. 391). For Bhungalia, the partial deaths produced in Indigenous humour produce productive alternatives. However, Bhungalia (2020) observed, correctly to my mind, that partial deaths and their particular parturitions are imbricated in economies of power and violence. They stated: Yet it is of course crucial that humor not be theorized outside of power relations. Just as mocking power can be a powerful delegitimizing act, so too does the reverse hold. … The larger point here is … that humor [as refusal] must be understood within a broader economy of power and violence. (p. 391)

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Next, I examine the economies of dissipation involved with quotidian acts of education refusal, for example onto-epistemological divestment. As such, the partial deaths of vivacide are not practised in a simple exchange economies, but within economies of compounding risk, where the political resources of life and death fluctuate over time (e.g., depreciation). Refusal: The Exhausted Economies of Dissipation

Educational refusals tend to be practised as quotidian acts rather than practised in “spectacular” fashion (i.e., self-immolation). Ball (2015) discussed educational refusals in just this way, and as a “variety of micro critical practices, very much lacking in grandeur” (p. 3). However, it is not my intent (nor Ball’s, 2015) to minimize the significance of vivacide by describing partial deaths as quotidian. Indeed, vivacide is my attempt to clearly acknowledge the constant and exhaustive practice of committing partial deaths in a life lived as continuous divestment of coloniality. Negarestani (2011) discussed the refusals of “di-ing” (i.e., divestment, disinvestment, etc.) as an “economy of dissipation” or where “[t]he umwege of life or the inflection of death is twistedly open to praxis (hence the possibility of political intervention and economic participation)” (p. 191, original emphasis). Economies of dissipation involve calculations involved with acquiring a partial and particular death coextensive with living through/with declinatures of coloniality. Negarestani (2011) defined economies of dissipation wherein they “outline the limits of both an emancipative conception of [refusal] and the speculative opportunities generated by the truth of extinction” (p. 188). Partial deaths also align with Achille Mbembe’s idea of “necropolitics”, or the “subjugation of life to the power of death” (p. 39). Necropower subjugates populations to unliveable conditions in which they are continually exposed to violence and deprived of conditions necessary to live adequately. Necropolitics, then, are tactics designed to maintain immanent states of dying, or what Mbembe described as “death-in-life” (p. 21). In other words, there are significant costs associated with immanent refusals, and these costs, I argue, relate to estimations about partial deaths coextensive with disinvestments from colonial life. One reason to acknowledge the immanence of continuous divestments is to clearly note the toll that it takes. In other words, the economies of dissipation are fatiguing. Tisha and polanco (2022) noted the exhaustion of acquiring numerous partial deaths as a practice of education refusal. They noted:

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I turn my back on the checklist of requirements in order to be granted existence into the euro-world. Mi corazón is able to find solace, and I am able to walk alongside my uninterest in life because the pain and loneliness that permeated my bones melts away alongside the standard of humanity and requirements of existence. I am now able to live with dignity outside the involuntary holds of ‘suicidality’ as someone who relates to life and death como se le antoje y que. (p. 133) The constant refusal of higher education is exhausting and, of course, disproportionately arranged. Partial deaths incur costs over time – the slow accretion of continuous and contiguous processes of dying and living. Vivacide highlights what Negarestani (2011) discussed as the “economies of dissipation” or “energetic opportunities which are posited as sites and conditions for participation” (p. 187). As a broad category that identifies the quotidian refusals of education, vivacides “outline the limits of … an emancipative conception of [refusal] …” (p. 194). In other words, vivacides are governed through estimations about its political efficacy to enact virtual (perhaps latent) political conditions. The point I would like to stress is that vivacides are practised in economies that are different than those governing suicide. Spectacular forms of refusal incur immediate costs to singular forms of life indexed to a particular value at that time.6 Vivacides, on the other hand, are immanent and durational, and expended within economies that alter the values of life and death over time. They are exhausting in this way. As such, the partial deaths involved in vivacide are not practised in a simple exchange economies, but within financialized economies of compounding risk where the values of the political resources (i.e., life and death) fluctuate over time (e.g., depreciation). In effect, the financialized economies of higher education have captured the labour of political resistance and transmogrified it into a constant work of refusal, partial deaths, and vivacide. The compounding effects of vivacide produce enormous amounts of exhaustion, particularly in relation to the reinvestments of colonial onto-epistemologies through the constant reform of neoliberal higher education (Ball, 2020; Ball & Collet-Sabé, 2022). Conclusion: Vivacide and the Political Lives from Death

I am a White academic writing from within a White university, situated on stolen Indigenous lands. In writing about refusal, I am implicated in the political and affective dimension of systemic racism, and perpetuate it each time I conduct research, teach and write from within its enclosures. This

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chapter is a speculative proposal that uses the idea of partial deaths and vivacide to subvert educational control premised on coloniality. It has been designed to unsettle conceptions of higher education and interject additional problems into its colonial and neoliberal practices. I do not provide obligatory recommendations to rectify or enable the continuation of this modernist institution. The basis for my position is that the very idea of higher education reform is a colonial technology sustained through neoliberal economies (Ball, 2020; Ball & Collet-Sabé, 2022; Webb & Mikulan, 2021). As such, this chapter has been written “and risked in the name of ‘impossibles’; future educational worlds that converge and diverge according to their own manners of composition” (Mikulan, 2022, p. 11). The chapter developed the concept of educational refusal as a constant practice of quotidian dissent to coloniality, or what I have termed vivacide. A stronger claim is that refusal must be a political tactic related to death and dying. Otherwise, refusal easily mutates into contemporary forms of petulance and resistance evidenced in ideas about “post-truth” and knowledge denial (e.g., climate science denial). More importantly, refusal must be a political tactic related to death and dying or it can quickly become synonymous with ideas of educational reform. For example, forms of Indigenous silence and humour refuse the very conditions of coloniality, including its colonial and neoliberal forms of political participation (e.g., dialogue and negotiation). Can quotidian refusals of coloniality be organized or mobilized? Should they? In other words, do uncoordinated refusals have greater political efficacy – “guerrilla” – to anticipate efforts by universities to manage and control acts of anonymity, criminality and fugitivity (Culp, 2022)? Is the power of refusal diminished, even co-opted, once organized, planned and managed (Murray, 2022)? What forms of exhaustion are maintained through the ubiquitous practices of educational reform? For whom? What partial deaths are “allies” prepared to endure? Vivacides likely generate a chaotic set of political conditions that are unplanned, unorganized and remain unmobilized. Rather, in the words of Langston Hughes (2002), decolonial vivacides may produce political conditions that “explode”. For some, a chaotic set of political conditions is necessary to decolonize the university (Moten, 2008). Moten (2008) argued to increase the uncertain potential of refusal, whereas “[t]he lived experience of blackness is, among other things, a constant demand for an ontology of disorder, an ontology of dehiscence, a para-ontology” (p. 187). The failure to utilize refusal in accordance with death and dying can render the praxis inert. These are the important lessons learned from decolonial literature, including contemporary ideas about Indigenous suicidology. Without death, refusal is a petulant politics that can easily become managed and coextensive with colonial and neoliberal reform.

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Educational refusal is a gambit that, while disavowing colonial systems of meaning and signification, may accelerate partial deaths associated through disinvestments and divestures of colonial onto-epistemologies. Colebrook (2017) argued that one generative death produced in the refusal of education is “stupidity”, whereas “[e]ducation is at once necessary to bring forth a future distinct from what we already are, and yet that orientation toward a world of relations that is not oneself comes with the essential risk of stupidity” (p. 649). In this sense, refusing education and generating the conditions of “stupidity” would produce a necessary kind of intensive thought that “would allow learning to be something different with every event of education” (Colebrook, 2017, p. 655). Notes 1 Foucault, 2001, as cited in Davidson, 2011. 2 The idea of death is certainly mediated by culture, particularly given its relative state of being unknown. Baudrillard (1993) argued against Western conceptions of death when he stated: [t]he irreversibility of biological death, its objective and punctual character, is a modern fact of [Western] science. It is specific to our [Western] culture. Every other culture says that death begins before death, that life goes on after life, and that it is impossible to distinguish life from death. Against the representation which sees in one the term of the other, we must try to see the radical indeterminacy of life and death, and the impossibility of their autonomy in the symbolic order. Death is not a due payment [échéance], it is a nuance of life; or, life is a nuance of death. (p. 179) 3 Of course, refusal of higher education often includes aspects other than ontoepistemological divestments. For instance, a decolonial politics may also add additional epistemologies into the university curriculum, rather than the politics and economies of dissipation. However, such an additive politics is beyond the remit of this chapter. 4 As cited in Davidson, 2011. 5 Rather than, for example, coextensive with biological life. This distinction is taken up by Donna Haraway (2016) in her discussion of human composting. 6 The anticipated political parturitions are also indexed to a particular value at the moment of suicide. In other words, the value of anticipated political parturitions also changes over time.

References Agamben, G. (2000). Potentialities: Collected essays in philosophy (Ed Daniel Heller-Roazen). Stanford University Press. Ansloos, J., & Peltier, S. (2022). A question of justice: Critically researching suicide with Indigenous studies of affect, biosociality, and land-based relations. Health, 26(1), 100–119. doi:10.1177/13634593211046845 Ball, S. J. (2015). Subjectivity as a site of struggle: Refusing neoliberalism? British Journal of Sociology of Education, 37(8), 1129–1146. doi:10.1080/01425692. 2015.1044072

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Ball, S. J. (2020). The errors of redemptive sociology or giving up on hope and despair. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 41(6), 870–880. doi:10.1080/ 01425692.2020.1755230. Ball, S. J., & Collet-Sabé (2022). Against school: An epistemological critique. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 43(6), 985–999. doi:10. 1080/01596306.2021.1947780. Bargu, B. (2016). Starve and immolate: The politics of human weapons. Columbia University Press. Baudrillard, J. (1993). Symbolic exchange and death. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Bhungalia, L. (2020). Laughing at power: Humor, transgression, and the politics of refusal in Palestine. EPC: Politics and Space, 38(3), 387–404. doi:10.1177/ 2399654419874368 Brown, W. (2015). Undoing the demos: Neoliberalism’s stealth revolution. Zone Books. Butler, J. (2015). Notes toward a performative theory of assembly. Harvard University Press. Caciola, N. (1996). Wraiths, revenants and ritual in medieval culture. Past & Present, 152, 3–45. https://www.jstor.org/stable/651055 Colebrook, C. (2017). What is this thing called education? Qualitative Inquiry, 23(9), 649–655. doi:10.1177/1077800417725357 Coulthard, G. S. (2014). Red skin, White masks: Rejecting the colonial politics of recognition. University of Minnesota Press. Culp, A. (2022). A guerrilla guide to refusal. University of Minnesota Press. Daily, A. M. (2015). It is too soon… or too late: Frantz Fanon’s legacy in the French Caribbean. Karib – Nordic Journal for Caribbean Studies, 2(1), 26–55. doi:10.16993/karib.28 Davidson, A. I. (2011). In praise of counter-conduct. History of the Human Sciences, 24(4), 25–41. doi:10.1177/0952695111411625 Deleuze, G. (1988). Foucault. University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. (1997). Bartleby; Or, the formula (D. W. Smith & M. A. Greco, Ed. & Trans.). Essays Critical & Clinical (pp. 68–90). University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1977). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press. Esmeir, S. (2007). Memories of conquest: Witnessing death in Tantura. In A. H. Sa'di & L. Abu-Lughod (Eds.), Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the claims of memory (pp. 229–252). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Fanon, F. (1967). The fact of blackness. In C. L. Markmann (Trans.), Black skin, white masks (pp. 109–140). Grove Press. (Originally published in 1952). Fitz-Henry, E. (2016). The limits of the carnivalesque: Re-thinking silence as a mode of protest. Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, 12(3), 1–16. http://liminalities.net/12-3/carnivalesque.pdf Foucault, M. 1980. Two lectures. In C. Gordon (Ed.), Michel Foucault power/ knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings 1972–1977. Pantheon Books. Foucault, M. (2001). Conversation avec Werner Schroeter. In D. Defert & F. Ewald (Eds.), Dits et e ́crits, vol. II, 1976–1988 (pp. 1070–1079). Gallimard. Foucault, M. (2007). What is critique? In S. Lotringer (Ed.), The politics of truth (pp. 41–81). Semiotexte.

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Freire, P. (1993). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Penguin. Glissant, E., Giraud, M., & Gaudi, G. (1973). Introduction à une étude des fondements socio-historiques du déséquilibre mental. ACOMA, 4/5, 78–93. Grande, S. (2018). Refusing the university. In E. Tuck, & K. W. Yang (Eds.), Toward what justice? Describing diverse dreams of justice in education (pp. 47–65). Routledge. Grosfoguel, R. (2013). The structure of knowledge in westernized universities: Epistemic racism/sexism and the four genocides/Epistemicides of the long 16th century. Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge, 11, 73–90. Haraway, D. (2016). Tentacular thinking: Anthropocene, capitalocene, chthulucene. e-flux, #75. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/75/67125/tentacular-thinkinganthropocene-capitalocene-chthulucene Harney, S., & Moten, F. (2013). The undercommons: Fugitive planning & Black study. Minor Compositions. Hughes, L. (2002). Harlem. Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation. org/poems/46548/harlem. Kaku, A. (2020). Burning the body: The bodily politics of Tibetan self-immolation. Theory & Event, 23(3), 573–606. doi:10.1353/tae.2020.0036 Khanna, R. (2008). Algeria cuts: Women and representation, 1830 to present. Stanford University Press. Koerner, M. (2011). Line of escape: Gilles Deleuze’s encounter with George Jackson. Genre, 44(2), 157–180. doi:10.1215/00166928-1260183 Maes-Jelinek, H. (1976). The naked design. Dangaroo Press. Mbembé, J. A. (2003). Necropolitics. Public Culture, 15(1), 11–40. muse.jhu.edu/ article/39984 McGranahan, C. (2016). Theorizing refusal: An introduction. Cultural Anthropology, 31(3), 319–325. doi:10.14506/ca31.3.01 Mikulan, P. (2022). An ethics of refusal: A speculative pragmatic challenge to systemic racism in education. Educational Theory, 72(1), 529–548. doi:10.1111/ edth.12545 Mintz, S. (2021). Decolonizing the academy. Inside Higher Ed. https://www.inside highered.com/blogs/higher-ed-gamma/decolonizing-academy Moten, F. (2008). The case of blackness. Criticism, 50(2), 177–218. doi:10.1353/ crt.0.0062 Murray, S. J. (2006). Thanatopolitics: On the use of death for mobilizing political life. Polygraph, 18, 191–215. Murray, S. J. (2022). The practice of everyday death: On the paratactical “life” of neo-liberal biopolitics. Canadian Review of American Studies. doi:10.3138/ cras-2021-017 Negarestani, R. (2011). Drafting the inhuman: Conjectures on capitalism and organic necessity. In L. R. Bryant, N. Srnicek, & G. Harman (Eds.), The speculative turn: Continental materialism and realism (pp. 182–201). re.press. Paunksnis, Š. (2010). The lost identity of mother India: Rape, mutilation and a socio-political critique of Indian society. Acta Orientalia Vilnensia, 11(2), 63–76. Peters, M. A. (2003). Truth-telling as an educational practice of the self: Foucault, parrhesia and the ethics of subjectivity. Oxford Review of Education, 29(2), 207–224. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1050611

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Peters, M. A., Rider, S., Hyvönen, M. & Besley, T. (Eds.) (2018). Post-truth, fake news: Viral modernity & higher education. Singapore: Springer. Simpson, A. (2016). Consent’s revenge. Cultural Anthropology, 31(3), 326–333. doi:10.14506/ca31.3.02 Tisha, X., & Polanco, M. (2022). An autopsy of the coloniality of suicide: Modernity’s completed genocide. Health, 26(1), 120–135. doi:10.1177/136345932 11038517 Tuck, E. & Yang, K. W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 1–40. Vila-Matas, E. (1994) Suicidi esempleri. Palermo: Sellerio. Warren, C. (2015). Onticide: Afropessimism, queer theory & ethics. ill-willeditions.tumblr.com. https://illwilleditions.noblogs.org/files/2015/09/WarrenOnticide-Afropessimism-Queer-Theory-and-Ethics-READ.pdf Webb, P. T., & Mikulan, P. (2021). Escape education. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 55(12), 1316–1321. doi:10.1080/00131857.2021.1926983 Weiss, E. (2016). Refusal as act, refusal as abstention. Cultural Anthropology, 31(3), 351–358. doi:10.14506/ca31.3.05 Wright, S. (2018). When dialogue means refusal. Dialogues in Human Geography, 8(2), 128–132. doi:10.1177/2043820618780570 Wynter, S. (2005). Race and biocentric belief system: An interview with Slyvia Wynter. In J. E. King (Ed.), Black education: A transformative research and action agenda for the new century (pp. 361–366). Lawrence Erbaum Associates. Zembylas, M. (2021) Refusal as affective and pedagogical practice in higher education decolonization: A modest proposal. Teaching in Higher Education, 26(7-8), 953–968. doi:10.1080/13562517.2021.1900816

PART II

Antiracist Refusal and Political Pedagogical Action

5 CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE PEDAGOGIES Australian Colonial Logic of the Centre and Aboriginal Refusal Lester-Irabinna Rigney

Introduction

Freire (2000) argued throughout his life that oppressed people’s dehumanization is drawn from the symbiotic relationship between schools and universities through colonial pedagogy. One cannot transform oppression in one institution without the other. This chapter considers it unhelpful to overlook this symbiotic relationship, but rather examines pedagogy. Improving education for Indigenous and minority students is an education policy priority around the world. Improving teachers’ skills to build on Aboriginals’ student funds of knowledge and using culturally responsive pedagogies to improve school and university results have made it essential to reconsider the role of teachers work. Education in a pluralist world requires teachers to understand that education systems are cultured and that all learners in the events of learning, reading and writing bring with them culture-specific practices and various ways of knowing. A mismatch can occur between the education organizational culture including educators’ own cultural backgrounds that differ from those of the learner. In settler Australia, education has been complicit in neo-deficit silencing of Aboriginal claims to knowledge, to place, to sovereignty, to voice and to culture. Despite a decade global neoliberal policy imaginary in education (Rizvi & Lingard, 2009) including Australian curriculum enactment and standardized testing – a large body of international academic research demonstrates that Aboriginal students who attend formal public education are likely to experience exclusion, curriculum alienation, racism and one-size-fits-all teacher pedagogies (OECD, 2017, Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, 2019). DOI: 10.4324/9781003367314-8

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Aboriginal students are disproportionality affected by neoliberal policy, onedimensional curriculum and teacher pedagogies that privilege the cultures of more powerful groups in the name of a perverse form of “equity”. These are seen as neutral, and objective yet deeply rooted in colonial logic of the “centre” positions that are anti-Aboriginal. Aboriginal student voices are silenced when they are isolated to the periphery of the classroom. Toxic learning environments imbued with formal epistemic violence blame Aboriginal students for their failure when their lived experiences, knowledge and cultural intelligences are positioned as antithetical to learning success. Data-driven neoliberal school architecture shapes teacher behaviour, discipline, practice and classroom management in performative terms (Lingard & Sellar, 2013; Mehta, 2015). Datafication constitutes teacher work and of students reductively in an all-pervasive quantified and hierarchal way (Meyer & Benavot, 2013). Research by Mockler (2013, 2015) and Mau (2019) shows the links between school neoliberal governing strategies, datafication, the rise of individualism and the omission of the collective and the cultural social. For Mau (2019), standardized numbers as techniques of governance are used to categorize and translate the process of comparison, rivalry and competition. This fuels “the idiosyncratic individual unique to ‘universal and compatible codes’” (Mau, 2019, p. 34). However, this administrative instructional core whether read through Foucault’s (1982) “disciplinary power” or Deleuze’s (1992) concept of “modulating power” show how the “logic of the centre” as core practice impeded diverse learning with general properties of disciplinary power, docile bodies manifesting in imposed architectures of governance and control of teacher work and students. Centre logic of the neoliberal instructional core as instruments of power always favours one-dimensional settler knowledge over plurality; yet they provide easy ways for the education workforce to get Aboriginal students to behave and to hold them responsible for their behaviour. Datafication as surveillance also informs Aboriginal parents of their child’s low performative comparisons with their settler peers based on numbers, hierarchical observations and normalizing judgements. These logics of behaviourism and datafication-grounded settler onto-epistemologies and values are consistent with the findings of Zuboff’s (2019) surveillance capitalism and the concept of “dataveillance”. The significance of the role of teacher pedagogy in facilitating new modern forms of Australian colonial logic of the “centre” in education as onedimensional curriculum and literacy in context is largely rendered invisible, irrelevant and unexamined. Unless refused by institutions and educators as an act of praxis redesign towards inclusion, Aboriginal learners are exposed to humiliating erasure of their own talents and rich funds of knowledges and its underutilization in the classroom for improved learning and

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achievement. Research shows that Aboriginal students become resentful when they are subjected to schooling-deficit views or the normalization of their invisibility in the curriculum (Graham et al., 2022). When Aboriginal students refuse, they are labelled as troublemakers, aggressive and deficit learners. The experiences of Aboriginal students by the undervaluing of their knowledges and identities are grief, rage, defiance, disillusionment and avoidance. Research highlights the way Aboriginal students are more likely to experience suspension and a lack of teacher feedback in class that constrain their confidence and motivation (Graham et al., 2022). Aboriginal learner aspirations for both settler literacies as plurality of knowledges while engaging cultural maintenance of their own oral histories and languages before they are lost are incongruent with one-dimensional educational colonial logic of the centre. The Aboriginal learner has a right to graduate from school secured in both identities of being Aboriginal and Australian. The definition of the good teacher gets “standardised” by what Ball calls the “tyranny of numbers” (Ball, 2015), which goes against positive constructions of teachers who push for instructional plurality. Castagno and Brayboy (2008) review of studies found that reflexive teachers who work through and past centre logic education traditions for a more humanistic one demonstrates a deep respect for students as full human beings and use their cultural frames of reference to engage higher cognition than usual traditional teaching. Commitment to “good” teaching in a pluralistic world demands practices that are globally responsible and locally grounded in cultural responsivity to be able to negotiate official mandated curriculum and the unique diverse lifeworld’s students bring to class from home. Improving schooling success for low-income Aboriginal students requires the teacher to view home culture as relevant and learn new skills and practice to validate and extend Aboriginal funds of knowledge (Moll et al., 1992). Teachers need to unlearn deficit constructions of students and shift to reposition themselves as learners in relation to their students and communities (Castagno & Brayboy, 2008). How then does “refusal studies” help educators redesign their classroom pedagogies to connect learning to student lifeworlds, and especially to knowledge plurality? In focusing on refusal as change to teacher practice, I am drawing on refusal as described in the “Introduction Chapter” by editors Mikulan and Zembylas of this volume. These authors recommend learning institutions, and their educators consider the ethical, epistemological, political and affective forces of refusal that denies, resists, reframes and redirects colonial and neoliberal logics. Aboriginal Australian scholars have been arguing for well over two decades for the benefits of decolonizing education (Rigney, 2006; Moreton-Robinson, 2011b; Fredericks, 2013; Rose, 2012; Arbon, 2008).

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Many claim engagement to build from refusal towards new knowledge ecosystems, practices and alliances not only to address instructional colonial logic of the “centre” but also to reclaim the education academy as a decolonizing space (Zembylas, 2021). This chapter will argue that this is where refusal as a pedagogy and practice may have a crucial contribution. I claim refusal as site of change to pivot towards learning experiences coconstructed by teachers and students dialogically that build connections to prior to school learner histories, languages, talents and knowledge. Indigenist Epistemology

Refusal praxis that contests, resists and reframes colonial logics are diversely conceptualized by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander scholars in Australia across many differing fields including feminist theories, race theories, class theories and postcolonial theories. Since 2000, others have emerged, including the Whiteness refusal turn (Moreton-Robinson, 2000), the decolonizing and sovereignty turn (Lowe, 2011), Indigenous epistemology and ontology (Arbon, 2008) and the turn to Indigenist intellectual sovereignty (Rigney, 2001). These methodological approaches to refusal embody robust conceptualizations for transforming de-humanizing colonial education structures. Moreton-Robinson (1999, p. 35) argues for a model resistance as refusal is a kind of “disinvestment” from the hierarchal rules of whiteness and relations: Indigenous women, men and children are forced to live with whiteness and the tension and conflict it creates in our lives… Living with whiteness means experiencing being treated as less than or not white…Indigenous people know that white culture does not respect, value or view as legitimate and valid our knowledges and rights on our own terms. We are presented as “the problem” on the margins of Australian society. She goes on to argue that “in order to reverse and resist the hegemony of whiteness, there is a need to deconstruct and racialise whiteness to offer useful insights about power relations in Australian society which can inform education practice and theory” (Moreton-Robinson, 1999, p. 35). Any effort to make sense of the project of education whether in schools or universities today must be situated in the long history of colonialism and its underlying legacy as pedagogical performance of Eurocentric discourse. What do pedagogies of refusal look like? In this chapter, I also take up a line of pedagogical refusal enquiry that began in a series of Indigenist epistemology papers on thinking past reproduction of one-dimensional settler ways of knowing in education and

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research (Rigney, 2001, 2003, 2006, 2010, 2011a,b,c; Morrison, Rigney & Kelly, 2023; Rigney et al., 2020; Kelly & Rigney, 2022), and explored further in a paper addressing the question of resistance in relation to deficit views of Aboriginal learners by schooling (Rigney, 2021; Rigney & Kelly, 2023). While I am using resistance as refusal here in the orthodox ontological way to theoretically confront settler primacy of universalized views of childhood, adolescent and adulthood provision, I use refusal to claim contexts pertaining to Aboriginal “theories” of lifeworld as assets and place-based pedagogies for change both with and against global (North/ South) decolonial ideas. My latter papers listed above argue that teacher pedagogy is a key site of struggle in the contexts of neoliberalization, homogenization and neo-deficit orientations of Aboriginal learners. That is, reform needed is a modern form of politics for a modern form of educational institutional teacher practice for plurality. Here in this chapter, I want to explore that premise further for resistance to normative notions of pedagogy, or what I shall call the refusal of, neoliberalization and education allegory. I will finally explore culturally responsive pedagogies as one way in which education as a discipline could review itself for new theorizations to reposition teachers as learners in relation to Aboriginal students and their communities. Education Allegory and Culturally Responsive Pedagogies

Allegory is an old idea dating back to Plato’s Cave in the book of the Republic and his view of education. As an analogy of the human condition, Plato makes clear that education allegory on the surface is where students are passively receiving one-dimensional hegemonic education. The underlying story, however, concerns Plato’s disillusionment with hegemony that instead education requires a reorientation (turn around) of the whole self as a transformative experience away from indoctrination. For Plato, education in any form requires resistance to the illusion of truth as not all education need necessarily be about the truth. In this sense, Australian education allegory can be seen on the surface by education policy failing Aboriginal students, while the underlining story is assertion and empty rhetoric about justice and fairness. Elements of education allegory and refusal analysis of the ways in which schools perpetuate racial, class and gender inequalities are invoked by other academic fields including Indigenous thinkers (Smith, 1999; Simpson, 2007; Moreton-Robinson, 2011a,b; Watego, 2021), critical theory (Freire, 2000; Apple, 1979; Giroux, 2010) and Black feminists (Da Silva, 2018). These authors in differing ways conceptualize relational ethics in education decolonization based on political and or first nations sovereignty forces of refusal.

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Aboriginal students in Australia in the main attend public schools that are now increasingly taught by a homogenous teacher workforce who struggle with intensification of “what works” (Biesta, 2019) dressed as compliance for decontexualized knowledge measured by standardization. There is now urgent need to shift away from one-dimensional, one-size-fitsall educational policy discourses that sustain normative universal understandings of childhoods and knowledge hierarchies. What operates in Australia currently is what I define as “Modern Australian education allegory” as institutional symbolic inclusion of Aboriginal knowledges represented as to the public as structural reform. In other words, educational institutions, especially schools, symbolically celebrate culture, for example “welcome to country ceremonies” and “Reconciliation Action plans”, but hidden, untouched and remaining the same are one-dimensional, de-contexualized, one-size-fits-all structures, teaching and curriculum. While new organizational structures had been built, it’s systems of power have successfully refused change and have not only failed Aboriginal students for decades but also failed to penetrate the instructional core. Symbolism is not enough to restructure the logic of the “centre” in education and is the default mode of teaching. The absence of understanding related to culturally responsive pedagogy in education for Aboriginal students, throughout all of Australia, means that Aboriginal students are routinely introduced to views of themselves as deficit and engage in curricula and/or pedagogies that are not matched to their funds of knowledge. Neoliberal policy ideas are matched to the norms of the pedagogical core to govern teachers. These unproductive pedagogies work hegemonically within a self-ascribed “high-quality evidence-based practice” architecture despite a decade of evidence showing their failure. Teachers are not the problem but policies that reify orthodox epistemological “centre” ideology are. If the desire of decolonization is to be realized, then teachers must be viewed as crucial partners to students when constructing knowledge, curriculum and pedagogy from their lifeworlds. The literature on culturally responsive pedagogies (Gay, 2002; Castagno & Brayboy, 2008; Paris & Alim, 2014; Bishop et al., 2007; Morrison et al., 2019; Rigney, 2021) highlights problems facing public education that privileges learning support to the human capital of the dominate group at the expense of the marginalized in diverse contexts. Culturally responsive pedagogies as a tool of pedagogical refusal of deficit teaching provide the teacher with new skills premised on building positive relationships, having high academic expectations and linking the cultural intelligences and student funds of knowledge to new learning (Sleeter, 2001, 2012). For the purposes of this chapter, I draw on my own Australian works to define the term “culturally responsive pedagogy” as “those teacher

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pedagogies that actively value, and mobilise as resources, the cultural repertoires and intelligences that students bring to the learning relationship” (Morrison, Rigney et al., 2019, p. v). If we are committed to improving Aboriginal student learning in Australian schools serving high-poverty communities, then researchers working alongside teachers in professional development are a key enabling condition for pedagogical refusal of deficit teaching. Building the students’ critical consciousness regarding power relationships by teaching in and through their cultural funds of knowledge allows the teacher to accumulate the necessary skills to cultivate students’ interests. International evidence has shown positive results in addressing disparities and achievement when teachers assemble culturally responsive pedagogical tools (Morrison, Rigney et al., 2019; Gay, 2002; Castagno & Brayboy, 2008; Comber, 2016; Sawyer et al., 2018). Kemmis (2010, p. 20) argues that practitioner research is crucial to developing a productive pedagogy and that “practitioners themselves are best positioned to be educational researchers”. Drawing on Kemmis in our Australian research on culturally responsive pedagogies with teachers, we study teachers as researchers of their own practice who redesigned their skills and practices to validate in classrooms plural ways of knowing and being. Our study developed (Rigney & Hattam, 2016) five key culturally responsive pedagogy principles for teachers practice in the Australian context (Morrison, Rigney et al., 2019, pp. 20–22). They include (1) high intellectual challenge, (2) strong connection to student lifeworlds, (3) recognition of cultural difference as an asset, (4) critical thinking and activist orientation, and (5) multimodal and pluri-vocal literacies. These ideas commit the teacher to new levels of the following: intentional and relational pedagogy; opportunities for reflective practice; approaches to extension and engagement through teacher and student co-constructed learning; and connecting inclusive range of curriculum content integrated to student cultural prior knowledges and experiences (see also Rigney et al., 2020). Our intention is to advance culturally responsive pedagogy as a positive approach to refusal pedagogy to counter silencing and deficit discourses and other erasures towards enhancing the educational experience of all students, irrespective of their home cultures. The more localized, inclusive, democratic and dialogic teachers are, the lower is the incidence and intensity of student disengagement. Culturally responsive pedagogies are underpinned by support for teacher instructional change and pedagogical models responsive to multiliteracies of minoritized learners, diverse values, commitments and actions. Such pedagogies embrace and build on student identities and background as an asset for learning that include a commitment to diversity, inclusion, justice, connecting learning with students’ lifeworlds.

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A tension can arise navigating the codes of power at the pedagogical core when culturally responsive practices are limited to cultural celebration of difference while firmly connected to default modes of schooling (Delpit, 1988, 1995). I agree with Castagno and Brayboy (2008) that culturally responsive pedagogy is realized when a shift occurs in the following: teaching self-reflection, analysis of power and pedagogy; methods; curricular materials; teacher dispositions; and school–community relations. Nonetheless a tension can arise between learning and navigating the codes of a dominant culture and realities of power, even if through the lens of critical pedagogies, and effecting the kind of radical transformation and re-conceptualization of education towards culturally responsive pedagogies gesture. An emphasis on student identities and background as meaningful sources for optimal learning demands that teachers hold high expectations for all their students by unsettling deficit and victim constructions of Aboriginal peoples. I would like to extend this and suggest that part of the challenge to improving outcomes for Aboriginal students using culturally responsive pedagogies is a comprehensive disruption to the default mode I am calling the Australian Colonial logic of the “centre”, especially for those students whose social, cultural and economic backgrounds are unmatched to instructional core practices of schooling. The challenge is pivoting away from superficial examination of the pedagogical centre to rethinking and restructuring the very concept of education in settler societies. Otherwise, pedagogies at the periphery of the core remain obligated to anti-education “centres”, hidden and cloaked with neoliberal, capitalist, colonial and anti-plural logics. Exposing the pedagogical core of the school or university for others to see is necessary to reform. In my view, there are four ways culturally responsive pedagogies profoundly challenge the pedagogy core of education: (1) empowering highorder Aboriginal thinking while unsettling deficit and victim constructions; (2) drawing upon Aboriginal knowledges and their sustainability while highlighting their subjugation; (3) working “with” rather than “on” Aboriginal peoples to privilege their voices rather than speak for them; (4) engaging in a “negotiated approach” where teacher reflexivity is required and that is sensitive to the power and politics of knowledge. My proposition underpinning this chapter is that the knowledge hierarchy at the instructional core is taken for granted in settler societies and that, for education of the Aboriginal student to be educational, teacher pedagogy for inclusion and justice should not be isolated from whole school/university reform. The belonging of Aboriginal cultures as pedagogical normative needs to recognize the historical, political, economic and ecological context of the local place, identities and power dynamics that have shaped them.

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As difficult as it is to achieve, if classrooms are to connect students’ lifeworlds to learning meaningfully, then teachers work must not operate solely from the “official centre” but, instead, bring the periptery closer to pluralize the middle. This means that we must address the question of how teachers can be supported to work with culturally diverse learners and plurality of knowledge and literacy. I reiterate the point: teachers need to disrupt powers acting upon them that keep them passive and docile in delivering standardizing one-size-fits all learning. If this is to occur according to Ball (2016), it is necessary to resist and struggle over teacher work and their subjectivities to reclaim them back from neoliberal underpinnings and its intensification. By subjectivities, I choose not to focus on individualized notions of identity that are seen as fixed. Rather my more modest pursuit is on teacher subjectivities in their duty as teachers that are open to change. It is important not to lose the struggle over teachers work as we know that teacher subjectivities affect instructional practice and practice affects subjectivity. Moreover, Aboriginal education reformers must not give up on schools and teachers work just because we have inherited them from colonialism. As sites, they are too important to the Aboriginal child’s rights and fundamental freedoms to overcome educational inequality. Decolonial advocates have little choice but to engage organizational structures that control teachers’ instruction as a means to dislodge the logics of centre. I argue that neoliberal sites of controlled domestication of teachers are also sites for the possibility of refusal towards transformation. In other words, culturally responsive pedagogies offer a lever for teachers practice as experimental to working with the intelligence of students. Drawing on Ball, I would like to add three more elements to the culturally responsive pedagogies’ repertoire of reflections on social justice education. These elements supplement and complicate the work of culturally responsive pedagogies. These include (1) teaching synthesis, (2) Aboriginal child as competent knowledge producer and (3) a commitment to the politics of refusal and culturally responsive pedagogies. The Struggle over Teachers Work

This chapter proceeds from the premise that teachers’ work and their subjectivities and their everyday teaching practices are key sites for averting hierarchical observation and normalizing judgements of Aboriginal students, thereby diluting their power. Ball writes: In relation to the ‘attitude’ of neoliberalism generally, and in relation to the techniques of performativity specifically, subjectivity is now a key

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site of political struggle the world… Struggle on this terrain is an engagement with, and can involve a refusal of, neoliberal governmentality in its own terms. (Ball, 2016, p. 1131) Classroom practice is at the heart of education, the world and our society. Pedagogical refusal against deficit teaching of Aboriginal students is critical to teachers work in a settler society like Australia. Educational spaces should be the site of learning for engagement with others, humanity and the planet for sustainability and renewal. The instructional core linked to change for making schools more economically efficient encounters obstacles by the growing workloads of teachers and the struggle for control over their subjectivities and practice. Ball (2016, p. 1131) states: All those on whom power is exercised to their detriment, all who find it intolerable, can begin the struggle on their own terrain. Ball (2016, p. 1141) recommends teachers refuse the projection of “individualism” identities onto their subjectivities that lead to a distrust of the concept of shared knowledge as a “means of renunciation of the comforts of a transcendental self” and the belief that we “can know ourselves in some way authentically”. In other words, teachers who shift closer to their authentic teacher self are more likely to explore their creativities skills and innovative talents when conventional identities that de-professionalize teachers are exposed (O’Donnell, 2022; Biesta, 2019). Teaching Synthesis

In learning, cognition and intellectual elements never operate in isolation of the social, emotional and cultural. The real tool for teachers is linking the classroom to students’ specific place, cultural and social context. The pedagogical refusal implications are clear then. Classrooms driven by teacher subjectivities that ensure the most favourable cultural, social and emotional situation for learners in genuine dialogue with students enable a synthesizing mind to take in a plurality of knowledges, reflect on it and then organize it in a way that is useful for them. Here I am drawing on Ball’s (1994) eclectic “toolbox approach” to argue for what I am calling a “teaching synthesis” that brings together a convergence of teacher and student interests in terms of teachers’ pedagogical toolbox that is culturally responsive to Aboriginal humanity in their becoming as both subject and creator of their knowledges and aspirations. Building the cultural frameworks of schools by creating a convergence of teachers and students

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interests and building of knowledge dialogically through “teaching synthesis” mean creating educational institutions that diverse learners actually need while upholding their right to a quality education. Not an easy task. In fact, creating spaces for diverse knowledges, voices and onto-epistemologies means not only rethinking how we reorganize structures to bring culture and diversity in education, but education itself. Certainly, “teaching synthesis” is fertile in values and potential for settler school and universities to see themselves as a plurality of knowledge bringers into one public site for growth and innovation. This function is the basis of new planetary sustaining cultures that recover, renew and connect histories linking groups of different origins (O’Donnell, 2022). Aboriginal Child as Competent Knowledge Producer

Reform environments are strengthened by reframing the teacher as nondeficit who seeks professional development in teacher synthesizing knowledge plurality. Pedagogical refusal as Education reform is to successfully shift the instructional core. It must also reframe deficit views of learners by understanding the Aboriginal student as competent knowledge producer. Effective local knowledge production of Aboriginal self and community sustains Aboriginal collective identity and belonging. It is also key to participation as a literate local and global citizen. However, in Australia the Aboriginal child, as an intelligent, competent knowledge producer of their own lifeworlds, has largely been untheorized. As I have argued elsewhere (Rigney, 2020, p. 579): The Aboriginal child as knowledge consumer but never producer is false emancipation. The nexus between identity, language, and cultural born from Indigenous epistemologies have been belittled and underplayed by colonial settler systems. It is little surprise Australia has trending disparity rise between Indigenous and non-Indigenous success at school. Culturally responsive pedagogies privilege respectful relationship towards democratic inclusion. Teachers need opportunities to shift their instructional behaviours from seeing Aboriginal students as passive to active knowledge producers for themselves and their communities by using a repertoire of teaching strategies that are place based, agentic, scaffolded, creative, dialogic and learner centred. Throughout history, the Aboriginal learner has been constructors of knowledge to solve community challenges. Teachers are prepared to provide active structures to support new learning by crafting classrooms as research labs for Aboriginal knowledge producers as experts to investigate their own lifeworld linked to world-centred

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knowledge (Biesta, 2019). This disrupts deficit views of Aboriginal children as troublemakers, unmotivated and anti-intellectual. It also refuses Aboriginal studenthood and performativity rooted in normative notions of childhoods constructed from the Eurocentric colonial centre that ignores their Aboriginal identities. Culturally responsive pedagogies can generate high levels of teacher intentional and relational pedagogy to sustain ethical respect for difference and the “other”. It can move beyond tokenistic celebration of culture towards more organizational structure of learning experiences that provide extension and engagement while valuing diversity and responsiveness to individual needs. These innovations open up new encounters and exchange with families and the broader community. Ball does highlight a risk of punitive educational mandates and behaviours when challenging the pedagogical core and its centrist position. But the image and idea of new repertoires of teaching practices about cultures also open new possibilities of bringing the plural periphery closer to the centre. A Commitment to the Politics of Refusal and Culturally Responsive Pedagogies

Penetrating the Australian instructional core and bringing interruption into the hegemony of contemporary policy, I advocate six provisional propositions drawn from Ball: 1 Refuse reductive explanatory frameworks that reduce teacher subjectivities to docile, numbers-driven performativity. 2 Build strong teacher–student relationships towards connecting culture to curriculum and allowing students to fluently cross cultures, local and global knowledges. 3 Shift from deficit views by reframing Aboriginal students as intelligent, competent producers of knowledge for themselves and their communities. 4 Refuse symbolic inclusion of difference in education (e.g., cultural celebration) masquerading as structural reform. 5 Privilege respectful, reciprocal, relational responsiveness pedagogy that enables students to use their cultural frames of references towards a higher level of cognition. 6 Resist to reorientate and reorganize systemic thinking from the centre. Universities and schools are in a colonial symbiotic relationship in both curriculum and pedagogy. The colonial logic of the centre must be dislodged by pedagogical refusal in both, simultaneously. If education is

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committed to improving Aboriginal academic engagement and achievement in postcolonial schools and universities, then teachers’ professional development in pedagogical refusal of deficit teaching is a key enabler for the next generation of teachers to think and live in the world. Is standardization of governing teacher pedagogies away from diversity? Yes. Pedagogical reformers must put to shame the dominant storytellers of “quality” education that are anti-Aboriginal with their obsession on return on investment, datafied tyranny of numbers, and power over the docile teacher to apply correct technologies. Culturally responsive pedagogies that move the periphery towards the centre create imaginary possibilities of plural normativity. Yet difficulties of societal integration due to new forms of colonialism, war, social upheaval and economic disparity may cause the instructional core of education organizations to shift back into homogenous spaces. The risk in education organizations ceases to be an extension of home for diverse learners where Aboriginal students can be subjected to prejudice and institutional racism. If our own citizenry subjectivity and those of teachers and students is the key site of struggle for neoliberal government, then transforming oneself to think differently about ourselves and others as “free” ethical subjects is worth struggling for. References Apple, Michael W. (1979). Ideology and curriculum. Routledge. Arbon, V. (2008). Arlathirnda Ngurkarnda Ityirnda: Being-knowing-doing: Decolonising indigenous tertiary education. Post Pressed, Teneriffe, Queensland. Ball, S. (1994). Education reform: A critical and post-structural approach. Open University Press. Ball, S. (2003). The teacher’s soul and the terrors of performativity. Journal of Education Policy, 18(2), 215–228. Ball, S. (2015). Editorial: Education, governance and the tyranny of numbers. Journal of Education Policy, 30(3), 299–301. Ball, S. (2016). Subjectivity as a site of struggle: refusing neoliberalism? British Journal of Sociology of Education, 37(8), 1129–1146 Biesta, G. (2019). Teaching for the possibility of being taught: World-centred education in an age of learning. English E-Journal of the Philosophy of Education, 4, 55–69. Bishop, R., Berryman, M., Cavanagh, T., & Teddy, L (2007). Te Kōtahitanga (phase 3) Whānaungatanga: Establishing a culturally responsive pedagogy of relations in mainstream secondary school classrooms. New Zealand Ministry of Education. Castagno, A. & Brayboy, B (2008). Culturally responsive schooling for indigenous youth. A review of the literature. Review of Educational Research, 78(4), 941–993. Comber, B. (2016). Literacy, Place, and Pedagogies of Possibility. Routledge.

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Deleuze, G. (1992). Postscript on the Societies of Control. October, 59, 3–7. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/778828. Delpit, L. (1995). Other people’s children: Cultural conflict in the classroom. New Press. Delpit, L. (1988). The silences dialogue: Power and pedagogy in educating other people’s children. Harvard Educational Review, 58(3), 280–298. Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. (2019). Closing the Gap: Report 2019. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia. https://www.niaa.gov.au/sites/ default/files/reports/closing-the-gap-2019/sites/default/files/ctg-report20193872.pdf?a=1 Da Silva, D. F. (2018). Hacking the subject: Black feminism and refusal beyond the limits of critique. philoSOPHIA, 8(1), 19–41. Foucault, M. (1982). The subject and power. Critical Inquiry, 8(4), 777–795. https://doi.org/10.1086/448181 Fredericks, B. (2013). We don't leave our identities at the city limits': Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people living in urban localities. Australian Aboriginal Studies, 2013(1), 4–16. Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed (30th Anniversary ed.). Continuum. Gay, G. (2002) Preparing for culturally responsive teaching. Journal of Teacher Education, 53(2), 106–116. Graham, L., Killingly, C., Laurens, K., & Sweller, N. (2022). Overrepresentation of Indigenous students in school suspension, exclusion, and enrolment cancellation in Queensland: Is there a case for systemic inclusive school reform? Australian Educational Researcher. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/227424/ Giroux, H. A. (2010). Bare pedagogy and the scourge of neoliberalism: Rethinking higher education as a democratic public sphere. The Educational Forum, 74(3), 184–196. Kelly, S., & Rigney, L.-I. (2022). Unsettling the reason of time: Indigenist epistemology and the child in the Australian curriculum. Discourse (Abingdon, England), 43(3), 386–404. Kemmis, S. (2010). Research for praxis: Knowing doing. Pedagogy, Culture and Society, 18(1), 9–27. Lingard, B., & Sellar, S (2013). ‘Catalyst data’: Perverse systemic effects of audit and accountability in Australian schooling. Journal of Education Policy, 28(5), 634–656. Lowe, K. (2011). Aboriginal languages reclamation: countering the neo-colonial onslaught. In Indigenous education: pathways to success: Conference proceedings (pp. 21–28). Australian Council for Educational Research. https://researchers. mq.edu.au/en/publications/aboriginal-languages-reclamation-countering-theneo-colonial-onsl Mau, S. (2019). The metric society: On the quantification of the social (S. Howe, Trans.). Polity. Mehta, J. (2015). The Allure of order: High hopes, dashed expectations and the troubled quest to remake american schooling. Oxford University Press. Meyer, H.-D., & Benavot, A. (2013). PISA, power and policy: The emergence of global educational governance. Symposium Books. Mockler, N. (2013). Teacher professional learning in a neoliberal age: Audit, professionalism and identity. Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 38(10), 35–47.

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Mockler, N. (2015). From surveillance to formation? A generative approach to teachers performance and development’ in Australian schools. Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 40(9), 117–131. Moll, L., Amanti, C., Neff, D., & Gonzalez, N. (1992). Funds of knowledge for teaching: Using a qualitative approach to connect homes to classrooms. Theory into Practice, 31(2), 132–141. Morrison, A., Rigney, L.-I., Hattam, R., & Diplock, A. (2019). Toward an Australian culturally responsive pedagogy: A narrative review of the literature. University of South Australia. Moreton-Robinson, A. (1999). Unmasking whiteness: A Goori Jondal’s look at some Duggai business. In B. McKay (Ed.), Unmasking whiteness: Race relations and reconciliation (pp. 28–36). Queensland Studies, Centre for Public Culture and Ideas, Griffith University. Moreton-Robinson, A. (2011a). The White man’s burden. Australian Feminist Studies, 26(70), 413–443. Moreton-Robinson, A. (2011b). Virtuous racial states. Griffith Law Review, 20(3), 641–658. Moreton-Robinson, A. (2000). Talkin’ up to the White woman: Indigenous women and feminism. Uni. of Qld. Press. OECD. (2017). Promising practices in supporting success for indigenous students. OECD Publishing. O’Donnell, A. (2022). Sharing the world without losing oneself: Education in a pluralistic universe. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, advance online publication. https://doi/10.1080/01596306.2022.2045072 Paris, D., & Alim, H. S. (2014). What are we seeking to sustain through culturally sustaining pedagogy? A loving critique forward. Harvard Educational Review, 84(1), 85–100. Rigney, L.-I. (2001). A first perspective of Indigenous Australian participation in science: Framing indigenous research towards Indigenous Australian intellectual sovereignty. Kaurna Higher Education Journal, 7, 1–13. Rigney, L.-I. (2003). Indigenous education, languages and treaty: The redefinition of a new relationship with Australia. In Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (Eds.), Treaty: Lets get it right (pp. 72–88). ACT. Rigney, L.-I. (2006). Indigenist research and aboriginal Australia. In J. E. Kunnie & N. I. Goduka (Eds.), Indigenous peoples’ wisdom and power: Affirming our knowledge through narratives (pp. 32–48). Ashgate. Rigney, L.-I. (2010). Indigenous education: The challenge of change. Every Child, 16(4), 10–11. Rigney, L.-I. (2011a). Indigenous education and tomorrow’s classroom: Three questions, three answers. In Nola Purdie, Gina Milgate, & Hannah Rachel Bell (Eds.), Two way teaching and learning; Toward culturally reflective and relevant education (pp. 35–48). Australian Council of Education Research. Australian Council for Education Research Press. Rigney, L.-I. (2011b). Social inclusion in education. In Dorothy Bottrell & Susan Goodwin (Eds.), Schools, communities and social inclusion (pp. 38–49). Palgrave Macmillan. Rigney, L.-I. (2011c). Settling indigenous education. In Morgan Brigg & Sarah Maddison (Eds.), Unsettling the settler state (pp. 206–211). The Federation Press.

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Rigney, L.-I. (2021). Aboriginal child as knowledge producer: Bringing into dialogue Indigenist epistemologies and culturally responsive pedagogies for schooling. In B. Hokowhitu, A. Moreton-Robinson, L. Tuhiwai-Smith, C. Andersen, & S. Larkin (Eds.), Routledge handbook of critical Indigenous studies (pp. 578–590). Routledge. Rigney, L.-I., & Kelly, S. (2023). Reterritorialising pedagogies of listening: Bringing into dialogue culturally responsive pedagogies with Reggio Emilia principles. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 44(1), 147–161. Rigney, L.-I., & Hattam, R. (2016). Towards an Australian culturally responsive pedagogy, Australian Research Council, Project ID: IN170100017. Rigney, L.-I., Sisson, J., Hattam, R., & Morrison, A. (2020). Bringing culturally responsive pedagogies and Reggio Emilia education principles into dialogue: Children learning to live together in diverse communities report. University of South Australia, Australia. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/361412529 Rizvi, F., & Lingard, B. (2009). Globalizing education policy (1st ed.). Routledge. Rose, M. (2012). The ‘silent apartheid’ as the practioner’s blindspot. In K. Price (Ed.), Aboriginal and torres strait islander education: An introduction for the teaching profession (pp. 64–80). Cambridge University Press. Simpson, A. (2007). On ethnographic refusal: indigeneity, ‘voice’ and colonial citizenship. Junctures, 9, 67–80. Sleeter, C. E. (2001). Preparing teachers for culturally diverse schools research and the overwhelming presence of whiteness. Journal of Teacher Education, 52, 94–106. Sleeter, C. E. (2012). Confronting the marginalization of culturally responsive pedagogy. Urban Education, 47, 562–584. Sawyer, W., Munns, G., Zammit, K., Attard, C., Vass, E., & Hatton, C (2018) Engaging schooling: Developing exemplary education for students in poverty. Routledge. Smith, L. T. (1999). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. Zed Books. Watego, C. (2021). Another day in the colony, University of Queensland Press. Zembylas, M. (2021). Refusal as affective and pedagogical practice in higher education decolonization: A modest proposal. Teaching in Higher Education https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2021.1900816 Zuboff, S. (2019). Surveillance capitalism and the challenge of collective action. New Labor Forum, 28(1), 10–29.

6 ANGER’S EROTIC POLITICS Antiracist Refusal as Decolonial Political Action Shirley Anne Tate

Introduction

Refusing implication and co-optation in anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism continues to be necessary in UK and Canadian universities. Using two auto-ethnographic examples as data, this chapter looks at what refusal as breaking silence does when the assumption is that because of the precarity of one’s status as a racialized outsider within, one will accept implication and co-optation into racism against other racialized groups’ members. One will not speak. One cannot speak. One must not speak. One is silenced because speaking against the deep grain of intersectional institutional racism produces vulnerability, precarization and marginalization. This matters if one is invested in the institution and feels that there is much to be gained from it without having to make racist compromises. Breaking the silence of racism matters less if we know deep within ourselves that racism always already produces those not racialized as white as outsiders within – vulnerable, precarious and marginal. This is the fact of being Black, Indigenous or a person of colour (BIPOC) in Canadian and UK universities. Frantz Fanon’s (2021) epidermalization walks universities’ corridors because of coloniality. After looking at silence and silencing through Michel Foucault (1978), I outline two auto-ethnographic examples of breaking the institutional silence on racism. I then trace Audre Lorde’s breaking the silence (2017a, 2017b; 2018a, 2018b) through anger as an intersectional politics of resistance that builds communities through affect enabling Black feminist decolonial antiracist relationalities. These intersectional relationalities make the ethical proposition into one about DOI: 10.4324/9781003367314-9

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who counts as human, who are seen as bearers of knowledge in institutions, whose affective life matters, and what this means for institutional white (settler) colonial power in universities. Let us turn to looking briefly at racist silence and silencing within institutions. Racist Silence and Silencing: Implication and Co-Optation

Racism’s institutional life produces silence and silencing through implication and co-optation. Implication – “the action or state of being involved in something” – and co-optation – “a taking over or appropriation of something for a new or different purpose” – draw us into white supremacy’s wilful anti-antiracism silence and silencing. Implication and co-optation at their fullest extent would mean that BIPOC direct and vicarious experiences of white supremacy are forever silenced because institutional silencing descends like a dampening fog. A fog which elides all assertions of racism and produces its own incontrovertible “Truth”. That is the lie of “post-race”/ tolerant multicultural institutional life. Although Michel Foucault paid little or no attention to race, colonialism or coloniality (Stoler, 1995), drawing on Foucault’s (1978) work enables us to see silence and silencing as strategies of governmentality. Silence on and silencing about racism in all its forms is one of coloniality’s governance tools that maintains white supremacy, when we subject ourselves to its injunction not to speak. Writing about the prohibition on sex among children, Foucault (1978:4) describes the imposition of a “general and studied silence” around children having sex, even though it was “common knowledge” that this occurred. If we begin with this idea, we can say that the existence and impact of institutional, structural and systemic racism are “common (though denied) knowledge” which is accompanied by “general and studied silence” on/ about its existence within institutions, nation states and interpersonal relationships. It is this general and studied silence on anti-BIPOC racism that we are drawn into through implication and co-optation in institutions. We can hear this, for example, when Black colleagues say that they have never experienced anti-Black racism at any point, and this has not blighted or negatively impacted their academic careers. The injunction to silence within toxic institutional cultures produces not seeing as a survival strategy by members of what is called in Canadian universities “equity deserving groups” and in the United Kingdom, “Black and Minority Ethnic (BAME)” groups. Naming as racialized others already sets up these groups as problems for institution and state alike because of their/our racial difference, not because of white (settler) colonial racism. Naming as racialized others already produces a general and studied silence about white supremacy.

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This general and studied silence means that anti-BIPOC racism’s presence in sociopolitical, psychic and institutional life is repressed to suit 21stcentury coloniality’s “post-race” (Goldberg, 2015) and “tolerant multiculturalism” sensibilities. Repression differs from the silencing brought about by penal law because, “repression operated as a sentence to disappear, but also as an injunction to silence, an affirmation of nonexistence, and, by implication, an admission that there was nothing to say about such things, nothing to see and nothing to know” (Foucault, 1978:4). This is an apt description of the “post-race”/“tolerant multicultural” state/ institution in which anti-BIPOC racism has been actively disappeared, silenced, capable only of being felt but not voiced. As a result of the injunction to silence anti-BIPOC racism becomes “nothing to see and nothing to know”. This means that racism can disappear into thin air even whilst it permeates the very walls of institutions (Gordon, 1997; Tate, 2016), lying in wait for those who have been so co-opted and implicated into/by racist institutional culture that racist jokes are “harmless fun”; lack of career progression means they “have to work even harder to succeed”; and being left out of networks is “because they have not got good enough social skills”. You can see where this is heading, right? Years of wasted life, battling a system within which you will never succeed maximally, or it will take you years to do so, because you do not have the sociopolitical, cultural and institutional currency that matters – white skin, white connections, white power, white privilege. This institutional (dis)ease cannot be spoken about because to do so would be to risk vilification as that 21st-century white supremacist construction, an “anti-white racist”. Silencing and being silent produce “amnesia-aphasia” on/of anti-BIPOC racism institutionally, societally and politically (Tate, 2020). We see this amnesia/aphasia in the United Kingdom’s Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities (2021) report’s claim that institutional racism does not exist and, as “a majority white state”, the United Kingdom is a world leader in race relations. We see this in the 2021 claim in Germany that racial profiling does not exist as part of policing strategies. We see this in the freedom convoys and marches in the United States, Canada and Europe in 2021–2022 barely concealing white supremacy with its anti-Covid restriction rhetoric as a call to white, nationalist and transnational action. We see this in the 2020 US and UK culture wars’ political negation of Critical Race Studies/Theory, Black feminism’s intersectionality and “wokeness”, which continues unabated. Wilful silencing of anti-BIPOC racism and assertion of inalienable white rights refuses BIPOC presence as legitimate, produces BIPOC absenting, and deletes the inhuman cruelty of white supremacy from historiography and public discursive or material memorialization (Tate, 2020). As I will

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show in the auto-ethnographic examples of refusal of implication and cooptation below, these processes occur within universities on a daily basis. Therefore, even if I am not a member of the group being targeted for white racist hate, the racism is vicariously felt and I must refuse implication and co-optation in white supremacy’s colonial divide and rule politics. Simply put, such white supremacist politics means that if it is not “your racial group” that is the target of white supremacist hate, contempt and disgust, the institutional injunction is that “you should be silent”. However, Black feminist decolonial antiracist consciousness means that I cannot submit to being silenced because that is tantamount to collusion with white supremacy. Silence and silencing must, of necessity, be refused. Refusing Implication 1: I Am Not Chinese

I was an external faculty member on the Learning and Teaching committee of a large Business School in a Russell Group University. One colleague in charge of a very large division in the Business School was discussing international students. He said that they brought a lot of money to the university and contributed to the cost of educating UK students. (True, I thought.) He then got to his point which was that international students come to the United Kingdom to be in classes with UK students, and not other international students like Chinese students. He said that Chinese students’ English language skills were so poor that this negatively impacted class learning. Apart from me, no one challenged him about the incredible racist double standard that international students paid for local students but were unwelcomed, unwanted and suffered marginalization in our classrooms. No one else took up my point, but instead discussed raising the English language requirement which, at the end, was kept at the university requirement. I think that they were shocked at my words because I am not Chinese and they expected me to go with the flow of the discussion because I was Black and would not see this as a racist affront and speak back. Refusing Implication 2: I Am Not Indigenous

I sat in the departmental meeting utterly stunned by the toxicity of white settler colonial anti-Indigenous racism produced in the zoom room. Some white colleagues and a PhD student entered the debate refusing to be silenced and seemed to be part of this toxicity. I watched, as if from a distance, and determined at that moment to write an analysis of what I saw unfolding so that no one could be in doubt that this was racism pure and unabridged. I will share my analysis in the email I wrote here:

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I don’t think that you needed to end positively on the candidate’s strengths because it would not have been valued anyway. An example… the colleague who declared his disinterest by saying neither of the candidates should be appointed, mentioned that the woman candidate had a lot of teaching in relevant areas of the job, that the previous Indigenous hire had also been problematic and they left after a year and a half. No-one took any of that up at all though to me he was pointing to her strengths and also the problem within the department of resistance to Indigenization. This latter was also mentioned as part of someone else’s comments, but was again not taken up. There was nothing that either of you could have done about redirecting from the violence either because it would have merely intensified. It was a ‘with all due respect’ moment when there was no respect given and none to be expected. That is the problem with agora style arrangements for doing feedback when some feel more entitled than others to speak and be heard even though what they say is noxious. Remember how one colleague defined a mob mentality? Also, for colleagues to say that the committee was wrong to bring her into a divided department which is divided BECAUSE of the process of HER hire is disingenuous because SHE is NOT the problem and the pretense at caring one jot about her well-being was offensive in its very callousness. Of course, even though she is being resisted as the hire, she will be callously used as a researcher by those who are already in touch with her although in their view she has NO right to be in the department. It was useful for me to listen with attention so that I can be a better mentor for her as she navigates the toxic space produced by her new colleagues. I then followed up this email with what should be done institutionally about anti- Indigenous misogynist racist violence: Based on the meeting today and the faculty meeting on the candidates I think that the feedback should be written. My feeling here is that procedure is being used to cover quite problematic anti-Indigenous misogyny for many of the 12 people who we heard are against the decision. Like you I have never heard of a decision being discussed like this at all and frankly to say that they are worried about a colleague entering this context is clearly untrue and dishonest. Written feedback only in future please because these sorts of meetings are violent themselves.

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What these two refusals illustrate is that we do not need to belong to the hated community/group in order to feel affront at the violence that is being meted out to them in absentia. I felt that violence myself. My response was absolutely visceral as I heard the racist injustice being openly and unashamedly uttered and witnessed the violence of its attempt to silence its audience. Silence enables both the BIPOC precarization and white fragility necessary for white supremacy’s institutional life and endangers both when it is broken. Refusal as breaking the injunction to silence is a powerful decolonial antiracist strategy. Refusal as Breaking Silence: BIPOC Precarization, White Fragility

Members of racialized equity deserving groups in universities are expected by the institution and our peers to accept our position of subordination/ subalternization, lack of career progression, negation as knowledge producers and suspicion of being academic imposters, for example, because we are always and can only ever be “equity/ positive action hires” (Tate, 2021; Gabriel, 2017; Arday, 2018; Mirza, 2018; Smith, 2022; Smith et al., 2017). Whenever I hear BIPOC colleagues say that they feel like imposters my innermost reaction is always that we have been made to feel like that by the institutional spaces we occupy. Anti-BIPOC racism produces psychic, material, social, political and bodily precarity. We must recognize this if we are to break the silence by refusing racism’s hold on our mind, its diktats about who counts as HuMan (Wynter, 2003), what is acceptable as knowledge, what fields of academic endeavour and which academics can occupy disciplinary canons and, indeed, what bodies can be located in which spheres of life and those which will be perpetually “out of place” (Puwar, 2004; Tate, 2013) in the university’s internal racial colony. As I write here, I feel pressed to put non-Black in brackets next to each issue to make clear that the academy is still a white, elite, non-meritocratic space, conceived of and enacted as such by its white occupants, aka, the only ones who legitimately belong. Those who legitimately belong and their BIPOC co-signatories of the racial contract (Mills, 1997) who are admitted into university power structures/ networks only with the proviso that they know their subordinate place, continue colonialism’s construction of “the black”, “the indio” (Wynter, 2003) and “people of color” (Edwards, 1790). The late Jamaican American philosopher Charles Mills (1997) reminds us that the racial contract means that the world is constructed in the image of those racialized as white Europeans and their descendants, that they produce “epistemologies of ignorance” of that world and their location within it that removes them from any blame for anti-BIPOC racism, and, in so doing, enable white (settler) innocence and futurity (Wekker, 2016; Dotson, 2018).

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None of this emerges by happenstance. To aver otherwise is to ignore how anti-BIPOC racism and misogynoir (Bailey and Trudy, 2018; Noble and Palmer, 2022) operate institutionally, structurally, systemically and interpersonally. To aver otherwise is to engage in racism’s bad faith, coloniality and the “post-race” (Goldberg, 2015) meritocratic myth of which the contemporary neoliberal university is so enamoured. However, we continue to hear enunciations which aver otherwise. These enunciations persist in order to facilitate white (settler) belonging, privilege, supremacy and futurity and diminish the possibility of white fragility. For Robin DiAngelo (2018), white people are socialized into superiority that they can be unaware of, but most definitely, cannot admit to ourselves. They cannot speak about race and become highly fragile because challenging their racial worldviews questions their identities as “good, moral people”. They feel unsettled at any attempt to connect them to racism and white supremacy. They see this connection as unfair. They cannot tolerate racial stress and the suggestion that being white has racial meaning triggers defensive responses, including anger, fear, guilt and behaviours such as argumentation, silence and withdrawal. All of these responses, including white silence enable racial equilibrium by repelling the challenge. White racial equilibrium returns comfort and dominance. Thus, although white fragility is triggered by discomfort and anxiety, it is based on white superiority, white privilege and white entitlement. White fragility is not weakness but is a very powerful means of white racial control and maintenance of privilege (DiAngelo, 2018) in institutions. Through maintaining white supremacy, white fragility is a core element of anti-BIPOC racism and misogynoir. White supremacy is shaken when we break the institutional silence imposed on us by an academia which refuses BIPOC decolonial antiracist political action. This silence must be broken to enable BIPOC liberation. Our refusal of silence and silencing, a refusal of the institutional injunction to disappear BIPOC self and antiBIPOC racism within institutions, is one way to enable the Black fugitivity (Wilderson, 2010; Moten, 2018; Weheliye, 2014) necessary for Black futurity (Hesse and Hooker, 2017) within knowledge systems, disciplinary canons, the academy as workplace and interpersonal interactions. Of course, refusing to be silent and refusal of being silenced means that we enact our own maroonage (Tate, 2022; Curiel, 2016). That is, we create our own marginality as a space of radical political possibility, of resistance (hooks, 1989). As practised during Caribbean enslavement, maroonage is about escape from the plantation. Therefore, maroonage is Black agentic movement away from the necropolitical life of colonialism, enslavement and coloniality and towards freedom (Tate, 2022). This is similar to Édouard Glissant’s (1997) “erranty” and its world-making

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potentialities which are in opposition to totalitarian thought and sees every identity as “extended through a relationship with the other” (Glissant, 1997: 18). Maroonage and its freedom choice of an institutional political and social life on the margins do not recreate our structural and systemic precarization, which is the basis of our intersectional racial subordination in institutions. The structural systemic precarization within which we live our institutional daily lives of anti-BIPOC racism and misogynoir produce attendant effects such as fear and shame (Tate, 2017), which we feel because of white hate, contempt, disdain and other negative effects (Tate, 2016). However, these negative effects that we feel also refuse the possibility that we can “put our finger on it” by naming them as anti-BIPOC racist institutional affect (Tate, 2016). Even while we feel its intensity, antiBIPOC intersectional racism’s deniability in universities means that claims of racist action or inaction can be actively disputed and muted (Tate, 2016; Ngai, 2004). Anti-BIPOC racism’s effects produce feelings of precarity because of its precarization. BIPOC feelings of precarity come from fear of how we know anti-BIPOC racism and misogynoir work institutionally, for example, through exclusion, never being promoted, having careers that falter. That is, a lived experience of active and virulent anti-BIPOC precarization in the workplace especially if we insist on theorizing from the “position of the unthought” (Sharpe, 2014: 59). Anti-BIPOC racism’s silence and silencing institutionally continues to reproduce plantation relationalities. This is especially so post-#BlackLivesMatter 2020 where we find ourselves in contemporary “post-race” racism times of white supremacist backlash against antiracism, decolonization and reparations for colonialism, Critical Race Theory, Black feminist Intersectionality, postcolonialism, and denial of racism as structural and systemic in European, Latin American and North American life. This is being openly voiced on right-wing, conservative and liberal political platforms alike, as well as by those who claim to not have a “political position”, in the media and in public and policy debates. In the face of such clear white supremacy, the politics and practice of anti-racist refusal is more urgent than ever in order to build communities of political resistance through affect. Refusal and Decolonial Relationalities: Resistance and Building Political Communities Through Affect

In the auto-ethnographies above, I felt affront not on behalf of others whose skins and lives I could not occupy but for myself as an anti-racist who cannot tolerate racism. I do not set myself up as a saviour of all racialized others but can only say what I find intolerable, what I feel must be

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spoken about and acted against, what must be refused entry to my innermost self, to my very soul. My refusal is an act of self-love and self-defence as much as it is trying to build a wall of protection against institutional racism behind which I-We can shelter. The “we” embraced by the “I” and vice versa means that refusal can and must build political communities through affect by enabling intersectional decolonial antiracist relationalities. We cannot keep narrow identity politics as an ongoing orientation because that is to court defeat of decolonization and antiracism through, again, colonial divide and rule. That is, I cannot say that I am African descent so only that racism which refers to “my group” is relevant. I must refuse that proscription from wherever it emerges in terms of politics. Instead, racism in all its forms and wherever it is found must be the target of anti-racist political thought and action in order to build solidarity for present and future decolonization and antiracism. This is nothing new, of course, and I can only say that it is a pity that I have to assert it in the 21st century. This shows though that in terms of decolonization and antiracism progress still needs to be made to avert death, dispossession, genocide and human suffering of all types. I know that you can feel that my writing, my words are driven by anger. My refusal of racism in all its forms and my refusal of narrow identity politics which undercuts solidarity emerge because of my anger at continuing racial injustice which at times feel insurmountable in its anti-BIPOC ferocity. As the late Audre Lorde (2018a) tells us, anger should not be denied but should be seen as a positive force for antiracist political action and societal/ individual transformation (Tate, 2021b). She says: My response to racism is anger. I have lived with that anger, ignoring it, feeding upon it, learning to use it before it laid my visions to waste. For most of my life. Once I did it in silence afraid of the weight. My fear of anger taught me nothing. Your fear of that anger will teach you nothing also. Women responding to racism means women responding to anger; the anger of exclusion, of unquestioned privilege, of racial distortions, of silence, ill-use, stereotyping, defensiveness, misnaming, betrayal and co-option. (Lorde, 2018a: 21) Like Lorde (2018a: 22), “my anger is a response to racist attitudes and to actions and presumptions that arise out of those attitudes”. Like her, I believe that we must learn to “express anger for [our] growth” (Lorde, 2018a: 22). For me, given my reaching across colonially imposed racial divisions to establish antiracist solidarities, this means that I have to “recognize the

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needs and living conditions of” others (Lorde, 2018a: 22), and also make their anger mine so that I can speak it, use it against “those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision [anger] can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change […] a radical alteration in those assumptions underlining our lives” (Lorde, 2018a: 25). Anger must not be silenced because of propriety or fear. It must “be expressed and translated into action […] for it is in this translation that we identify who are our allies with whom we have grave differences and who are our genuine enemies” (Lorde, 2018a: 26). Lorde’s differentiation between allies in difference and enemies is important. Its importance lies in making us aware that decolonial antiracist survival is only possible by weaving solidarities as we go about our political work of transformation as we saw in #BLM 2020. Anger at white supremacy and anti-Black racism forged a global BLM. We should not fear anger. Like Lorde, we should see anger as an appropriate reaction to racism. Anger also enables us to get past intersectional racial suffering to the political work of empowerment, liberation and survival. As we break institutional silence and silencing on racism, anger’s erotic life, its power, ensures empowerment, liberation and survival. In Lorde’s (2018b: 5–6) view, the “erotic is a resource within each of us […] firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling [… and] rises from our deepest and non-rational knowledge”. Our deepest and non-rational knowledge points to anger as affect, although Lorde speaks about feeling and emotion. Lorde’s is not the erotic related to pornography and women’s inferiority within “male models of power [… where] it has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation” (Lorde, 2018b:6). The erotic is about what we do, our actions, but also about how deeply we can feel in the process of that doing. For the individual, the erotic has psychic, emotional, physical, political and intellectual aspects, while its operation is multi-scalar politically, societally, interpersonally and institutionally. Lorde (2018b) uses joy as her example to elaborate its ability to build community beyond difference. I would add here that #SayHerName and #RhodesMustFall also illustrate that anger is an affective force with an erotic power that builds solidarity across intersectional racial difference and across space and time. Anger produces empowering erotic knowledge through which we can scrutinize ourselves, society and institution through a racial “socio-diagnostics” (Gordon, 1997) which enables us to hone political action as we let go of what is inimical to our very being, our humanness. In doing this letting go of what is detrimental to us, we also let go of our fear of precarity, break racism’s silence and refuse an institutional life forced on us by external directives and not our own needs.

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We must refuse anti-BIPOC racism’s otherness and subjugation. We must use anger at racial injustice to fuel that refusal. We have no other option if we are to save ourselves and each other from racisms’ quotidian psychic violence. “For as we begin to recognize our deepest feelings, we begin to give up, of necessity, being satisfied with suffering and self-negation, and with the numbness which so often seems like their only alternative in our society” (Lorde, 2018b: 12). Tapping the erotic within us to break racism’s silence means we do not accept “powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial” (Lorde, 2018b:12). Those other “supplied states of being” not inherent to me/us speak to the pervasiveness of anti-BIPOC racism and misogynoir’s negation as well as their affective load, which is intensely felt, carried within the self, to emerge as daily punishment. Once we clearly see and recognize these “states” as not of us, we are already refusing racism’s silence and silencing because we cannot look away. We cannot ignore it. We cannot say it does not exist. We cannot say we have never experienced it. The only position left to us is to refuse silence/silencing through decolonial antiracist political action. Lest we forget, Lorde (2017a) reminds us that our silence will not protect us, silence immobilizes us and there are innumerable silences that need to be broken. To break with the institutionally produced fear that silences us, we must ask ourselves, what is the worst thing that could happen if we spoke? This puts the fear which underlies our silence and our immobilization into context, because we must and cannot avoid recognizing that “the transformation of silence into action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger” (Lorde, 2017a: 3). Although we can never be without fear, totally fearless because of the unknowns of any situation, we can practise speaking through and with fear as we refuse white supremacist racism’s silence and silencing. If we do not speak, if we do not enact refusal, we succumb to racism’s suffering, “the nightmare reliving of unscrutinized and unmetabolized pain” (Lorde, 2017b: 164). Racism causes pain. The pain of anti-BIPOC racism and misogynoir as something that happened, as an event, must be recognized. Recognition is important to ensure we do not ‘rob [ourselves] of the power that can come from using that pain, the power to fuel some movement beyond it. I [We] condemn myself [ourselves] to reliving that pain over and over whenever something close triggers it. And that is suffering, a seemingly inescapable cycle. (Lorde, 2017b: 164–165)

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Lorde makes clear that pain and suffering are distinct. If we use pain, we can engage in political action, but if we relive it, we condemn ourselves to endless suffering. Anne Anlin Cheng (2001) talks about this in terms of the movement from grief to grievance as we take political action. Refusal enables grievance as political work and stops endless BIPOC suffering at racists’ hands. “Your silence will not protect you” (Lorde, 2017b). Anger facilitates the movement beyond suffering at racism’s hands, enabling resistance and building solidarities/political communities through affect as we affect and we are affected. As we build solidarities/political communities through affect, we embrace the late Martinican poet Édouard Glissant’s (1997) “opacity”. By opacity, Glissant is referring to an unquantifiable alterity that exceeds, and through this refuses, categories of the identifiable difference coded by coloniality and “post-race” racisms. In this refusal, antiracist solidarities working through opacity lay bare coloniality’s marking of the world through bodies still lived as Hortense Spiller’s (1987) “flesh”, Fanon’s (2021) historico-racial epidermal schema, racial representation (Moten, 2018), and racialized identity politics. Refusing silence/silencing is an ethical demand to be heard but to not be made known through the white gaze as the colonial other. Our refusal of silence/silencing and our refusal of being seen as the colonial other connect together within a powerful ethics of opacity as a mode of decolonial antiracist refusal. Indeed, as Glissant (1987) avers, decolonization will have been accomplished when the Other cannot be completely understood as finitude in opposition to the One of the West and its HuMan. Decolonial antiracist refusal is the political action of maroonage/fugitivity, a turning away from the plantation life of universities that asserts BIPOC becoming, power, knowledge and affect. Conclusion

Refusal of racisms’ knowledge, actions, strategies, prerogatives and ordering of the world is possible through action. This action, as a part of other actions, produces a disruptive chain of events which can lay antiBIPOC racism bare. These actions can also reveal those who refuse antiracist refusal and offer them up for our scrutiny, and we can reflect our findings back to those who are signatories of the racial contract. Breaking through our own fear of precarization, marginalization and out-managing from our jobs, we should reflect on Lorde and think about the power invested within us to act. Feeling anti-BIPOC racism so viscerally that anger bursts forth uninterrupted has been a liberation for me over years of seeing/experiencing anti-BIPOC violence. Anger has enabled me to speak. Anger has enabled me to break the injunction to silence in institutions.

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Once silence is refused, broken, it flows like water touching and cleansing those nooks and crannies of the self, institution and society that have long remained closed to public scrutiny. Continuing decolonial antiracist refusal is necessary as we look towards a mid-21st century in which antiBIPOC racism still roams freely. References Arday, J. (2018). Being Black, male and academic: Navigating the white academy. In J. Arday & H. S. Mirza (Eds.), Dismantling race in higher education: Racism, whiteness and decolonising the academy (pp. 161–174). Palgrave Macmillan. Bailey, M., & Trudy (2018). On misogynoir: Citation, erasure and plagiarism. Feminist Media Studies, 18(4), 762–768. Cheng, A. A. (2001). The melancholy of race: Psychoanalysis, assimilation and hidden grief. Oxford University Press. Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities. (2021). The Report. https://assets. publishing.service.gov.uk (accessed 7 April 2022) Curiel, O. (2016). Rethinking radical antiracist feminist politics in a global neoliberal context. Meridians, 14(2), 46–55. DiAngelo, R. (2018). White fragility: Why it’s so hard for white people to talk about racism. Penguin. Dotson, K. (2018). On the way to decolonization in a settler colony – Re-introducing Black feminist identity politics. AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples, 14(3), 190–199. Edwards, B. (1790). The history civil and commercial of the British colonies in the West Indies. Printed for John Stockdale, Piccadilly. Fanon, F. (2021). Black skin, white masks. Penguin Modern Classic. Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality, Vol 1, an introduction (R. Hurley, Trans.). Penguin. Gabriel, D. (2017). Overcoming objectification and dehumanization in academia. In D. Gabriel & S. A. Tate (Eds.), Inside the ivory tower: Narratives of women of colour surviving and thriving in British Academia (pp. 25–38). Trentham Books/IOE Press. Goldberg, D. T. (2015). Are we all postracial yet? Polity Press. Gordon, L. R. (1997). Her majesty’s other children: Sketches of racism from a neocolonial age. Rowman and Littlefield. Hesse, B., & Hooker, J. (2017, July). Introduction: On Black political thought inside global Black protest. South Atlantic Quarterly, 116(3). https://doi. org/10.1215/00382876-3961428 hooks, b. (1989). Choosing the margin as a space of radical openness. Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, 36, 15–23. Lorde, A. (2017a). The transformation of silence into language and action. In A. Lorde (Ed.), Your silence will not protect you: Essays and poems (pp. 1–6). Silver Press. Lorde, A. (2017b). Eye to eye: Black women, hatred and anger. In A. Lorde (Ed.), Your silence will not protect you: essays and poems (pp. 133–169). Silver Press.

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Lorde, A. (2018a). Uses of anger: Women responding to racism. In A. Lorde (Ed.), The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house (pp. 21–51). Penguin Modern Classic. Lorde, A. (2018b). Uses of the erotic. In A. Lorde (Ed.), The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house (pp. 5–15). Penguin Modern Classic. Mills, C. (1997). The racial contract. Cornell University Press. Mirza, H. S. (2018). Racism in higher education: “What then, can be done?” In J. Arday & H. S. Mirza (Eds.). (pp. 3–26). Moten, F. (2018). Stolen life. Duke University Press. Ngai, S. (2004). Ugly feelings. Harvard University Press. Puwar, N. (2004). Space invaders: Race, gender and bodies out of place. Berg Publishers. Sharpe, C. (2014). Black studies: In the wake. The Black Scholar: Journal of Black Studies and Research, 44(2), States of Black Studies, Summer, 59–69. Smith, M. S. (2022). Charting Black presence and futures in the Canadian academy. In A. Ibrahim, T. Kitossa, M. S. Smith, & H. K. Wright (Eds.), Nuances of Blackness in the Canadian academy (pp. 430–459). University of Toronto Press. Smith, M. S., Henry, F., Dua, E., Ramos, H., James, C., Kobayashi, A., and Li, P. S. (2017). The equity myth: Racialization and indigeneity at Canadian Universities. UBC Press. Spillers, H. (1987). Mama’s baby, papa’s maybe: An American grammar book. Diacritics, 17(2), Summer, 64–81. Stoler, A. L. (1995). Race and the education of desire: Foucault’s history of sexuality and the colonial order of things. Duke University Press. Tate, S. A. (2013, July). Racial affective economies, disalienation and ‘race’ made ordinary. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 37(13), 2475–2490. Tate, S. A. (2016). ‘I can’t quite put my finger on it’: Racism’s touch, Ethnicities, 16(1), 68–85. Tate, S. A. (2017). How do you feel? ‘Well-being’ as a strategic deracinated goal in UK uinversities. In D. Gabriel, & S. A. Tate (Eds.), Inside the ivory tower: Narratives of women of colour surviving and thriving in British academia (pp. 54––66). Trentham Books/IOE Press. Tate, S. A. (2018). Descolonizando a Raiva: teoria feminista negra e a práctica nas universidades do Reino Unido (Decolonizng anger: Black feminist theory and practice in UK universities). In Joaze Bernardino Costa et al. (Eds.), Decolonialidade e Pensamento Afrodiaspórico/Decoloniality and Afrodiasporic Thought (pp. 183–201). Autêntica. Tate, S.A. (2020). Decolonising sambo: Transculturation, fungibility and Black and people of colour futurity. Emerald Publishing. Tate, S. A. (2021a). Why me? Questions of racial equality and institutional racism in academia. TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies. https://doi. org/10.3138/topia-2020-0007 Tate, S.A. (2021b). On brick walls and other Black feminist dilemmas: Anger and racial diversity in universities. In M. Crul, L. Dick, H. Ghorashi, & A. Valenzuela Jr (Eds.), Scholarly engagement and decolonisation: Views from South Africa, the Netherlands and the United States. Sun Media. https://doi. org/10.18820/9781928314578/03

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Tate, S. A. (2022). From post-intersectionality to Black decolonial feminisms: Black skin affections. Routledge. Weheliye, A. (2014). Introduction: Black studies and black life. The Black Scholar: Journal of Black Studies and Research, 44(2) Summer, 5–10. Wekker, G. (2016). White innocence: Paradoxes of colonialism and race. Duke University Press. Wilderson, F. (2010). Red, White and Black: Cinema and the structure of US antagonisms. Duke University Press. Wynter, S. (2003). Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation – An argument. CR: The New Centennial Review, 3(3), 257–337.

7 (RE)IMAGINING HESA THROUGH REFUSAL The Complexities of Confronting Colonialism in the University Agustin Diaz, Angie Kim, Alonso R. Reyna Rivarola, and Sharon Stein

Introduction

Higher Education and Student Affairs (or HESA, a US-based acronym describing the administrative core of the university) is an interdisciplinary field focused on training professionals to work with college students and serve as higher education administrators. HESA has long been the “professional home” (i.e., workplace) to a subset of scholars and practitioners who are focused on questioning the origins and purpose of the profession and pay attention to issues of race, gender, colonialism, Indigeneity, inequality and social justice inside and outside higher education (Patton, 2016). While this work to challenge the unequal power dynamics within higher education and the field of HESA itself has historically been marginalized, the mainstream field has recently taken small steps to extend its engagement around these issues (e.g., the 2018 ACPA Strategic Imperative for Racial Justice and Decolonization and the recent ASHE efforts to deepen its accountabilities to Indigenous Peoples and lands). Yet we suggest that overall, HESA remains unprepared to accountably and impactfully work across the many layers of inequity, complexity, heterogeneity, polarization and pushback that characterize the current social and institutional contexts, especially about issues of racism and colonialism, and especially when these are engaged through decolonial and abolitionist approaches. In this chapter, we reflect on our positionalities, practice and research as HESA scholars and practitioners who are devoted to decolonial and abolitionist praxis in higher education. Before we proceed, we note that, on the DOI: 10.4324/9781003367314-10

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global stage, abolitionism is not as widely circulated and also that “decolonial” and “decolonization” have taken on many different, often-contested meanings across different countries and across time. In order to situate ourselves within a non-universalizing geo-/bio-politics of knowledge, we specify that we are writing this text based on our experiences working within higher education institutions located in what is currently known as the United States, and our use of these terms is also situated within this context. However, we also note that “abolition” and “decolonization” are taken up differently even within a single national context, and thus we specify that our use of these terms resonates with Sepulveda’s (2020) explanation of both concepts as interconnected ways of approaching the dismantling of systems and seeking new ways of being: “Neither abolition nor decolonization are metaphors. Both movements want what they say—an end to policing and prisons, and an end to land theft and the return of the land to Native peoples” (para. 3). Our reflections draw from decolonial and abolitionist work to illustrate some of the complexities, contradictions and complicities that arise in efforts to enact change within higher education institutions in the United States. In our experience, some HESA practitioners are already deeply aware of these complexities, contradictions and complicities, because they observe and experience them in their everyday lives within the institution; however, they do not necessarily have the language or the capacities to deftly navigate them, or they are hesitant to do so because of fear of reprisal from their institution. Our positionalities inform our work along with our invitation in this chapter: Tino is an Andean Ceibeño born in Lenape lands (currently known as New York) and settled in Ute and Shoshone territory (currently known as Utah) as a programme director; Angie is an immigrant settler in Anishinaabeg territory (currently known as Michigan) studying HESA; Alonso is an illegalised immigrant in Eastern Shoshone and Goshute lands (also Utah) working as a programme director; and Sharon is a white settler working on Musqueam lands (currently known as Vancouver, Canada) and researching critical and decolonial perspectives in HESA. We draw inspiration from the notion of “refusal” as theorized and practised by Indigenous and Black scholars and activists such as Ambo (2018), Kelley (2016), Ferguson (2017) and Grande (2018), which centre relationality, collective resistance and confronting recognition-politics within the university and apply this framing of refusal throughout our dialogue. At the same time, we continue to sit with the question of how our own refusals of the university look different as non-Indigenous and non-Black people, given the ways that we are positioned (to varying degrees) as systemically

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complicit in the very structures and systems that Black and Indigenous scholars and activists are refusing. Our lives and livelihoods are subsidized by systemic colonial violence, and this complicity does not simply disappear just because we critique those structures and systems, and just because those structures and systems might also marginalize us in different ways as well. Drawing in our understanding of refusal and layering own experiences as well as critical literatures in abolition and decolonization in higher education (Ambo, 2018; Ferguson, 2017; Grande, 2018; Kelley, 2016; Stein, 2021), we identify and problematize two tropes of innocence that circulate within HESA (Ahmed, 2012). The first trope concerns the mainstream field itself, which tends to naturalize the idea that higher education is in service of the public good while rarely acknowledging or engaging how higher education has contributed to the reproduction of historical and ongoing racial and colonial inequities and injustices (Stein, 2021). The second trope of innocence circulates among critical scholars who are actively engaged in important anti-racist, decolonial and social justice work. As a result, they may position themselves as outsiders of the systemic harm they are trying to critique and challenge, but we are all implicated in the harms perpetrated by our institutions to some degree, even when we are critical of them (Mitchell, 2015; Shotwell, 2016). What these tropes suggest is that, rather than inviting people to take up the work of institutional change with the promise that this will ensure their innocence and virtue, it might be more generative to invite people to consider their own, multi-layered relationships to systemic social and institutional violence (as victims and/or beneficiaries) and to ask what responsibilities follow from these relationships (Ahmed, 2012). This is why our dialogue in this piece provides space to hold the contradiction that those working in the HESA field could have a big role to play in moving higher education toward less harmful directions, but that we also remain implicated in that harm. There are no easy, feel-good answers or alternatives here; only the complex, long-term work of learning to know, be, and relate otherwise without assuming that we will ever finally “arrive”. Literature Review

We direct this piece to the administrative backbone of HESA – the advisors, coordinators, managers, assistant directors, directors and senior administrators of the field who directly assist students and faculty. Despite our willingness to care and offer a public good, the higher education institutions we serve are hardly immune from reproducing the inequities of

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wider society, as described by Krone (2021) in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic: Then, in early 2020, the deep-seated, structural problems with student affairs could no longer be hidden behind the students – because the students just weren’t around. For over a year. There has been nothing to distract from the crush of the system and people who uphold it…. It also became clear that no matter how much loyalty our institutions demand of us, they will never be loyal to us in return. (Para. 7) It is important to note that we are not trying to erase the critical work that educators and practitioners in HESA have done, especially on behalf of students, but we remain embedded in a harmful system, as Krone notes. In this chapter, we are oriented by analyses that trace how the university maintains a system rooted in political and epistemological dominance that has been interrupted but not dismantled, despite the numerous pledges of support by campuses to be more diverse and inclusive (Naepi et al., 2017). In other words, HESA represents the administrative backing that helps maintain Eurocentric, white supremacist and capitalist epistemological structures within the university, reflecting its institutional origins. The history of the modern/colonial university has its roots in the splitting of schools into vertical grades of ascension that better controlled local populations by dividing instruction by gender, age and eliminating alternative modes of study in early Europe (Grosfoguel, 2013; Meyerhoff, 2019). As these early educational models began to take root within a modernizing Western Europe, they were also circulated to settler colonial sites, such as the United States and Canada. There, early colleges enacted similar restrictions on student autonomy known as in loco parentis that disciplined students in order to maintain societal standards, which were widely shaped by elitist discourses (Harms, 1970). Beyond simply being designed for elites, these educational systems were designed for white, cisgender men, and were often premised on the exploitation and expropriation of Black, Indigenous, and other racialized peoples’ lands and labour (Patton, 2016). The solidification of the field of student affairs in the United States came about with significant federal support to expand higher education, especially after World War II (Mcnair et al., 2016). By the civil rights era, HESA as a field experienced a shift that Gaston-Gayles et al. (2005) describes as moving from authoritarian-like to change-agent. Students and HESA educators and practitioners demanded “a new social and

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intellectual makeup of the university and for a new social order in the nation at large” (Ferguson, 2017, p. 9). However, the past several decades of university privatization have further marginalized racialized and minoritized peoples on campus by equating their presence with profit and positive public relations (PR). The loss of federal and state financial support introduced a more deeply managerial higher education culture where instead of advocating for students and social change, advisors and administrators are expected to push for measurable departmental objectives and the completion of university requirements (Capper, 2015; Gaston-Gayles et al., 2005; Wolf-Wendel et al., 2004; Saunders, 2010). Patton (2016) notes that HESA educators and practitioners are not necessarily invited to consider the capitalist and colonial past and present of the university, and the knowledge and critique of the HESA field rarely address it directly. The field’s historical literature centres white experiences, typically that of men (Stein, 2021), and the lack of a critical edge to the scholarship and discourse of student affairs remains as a “fixed series of dates, names, and publications to memorize lacking any critical analysis into what might be missing” (Patton, 2016, p. 42). This creates a lack of reference, and with this in mind we are inspired by theorizations of refusal as a form of praxis from Indigenous scholars/activists, the Black radical tradition, and women and trans/queer scholars within those circles. Refusal, in this sense, does not utilize popular modes of resistance that are based on direct oppositional tactics and instead focuses on “… abstention, a disinvestment from rules of engagement. [Refusal] is a declaration of limits, a repeal of consent” (Bhungalia, 2020, p. 390). As an ethos, refusal becomes a means to deny the state or other institutions authority over and access to the body, mind and spirit, altering our relationship with societal institutions while also opening space for radical futurities and relationality. In the university, Grande (2018) argues that refusal, as informed by Indigenous political thought and the Black radical tradition, potentially commits to the challenge of creating spaces of connection through that which was first used to divide. This could mean refusing individualism, seeking reflexive accountability and enacting more reciprocal relationships. In this chapter, we do not intend to theorize refusal from the position of Indigenous political thought or the Black radical tradition, but we are inspired by Grande (2018)’s notion of refusing the university. In the dialogue that follows, we consider the complexities involved in the efforts of HESA scholars and practitioners like us to refuse the continuity of “business as usual” and disinvest from the futurity of the modern/colonial university so that something else might become possible.

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How We Arrived at This Work

Alonso: It all started in 2008 when I was part of a Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) collective. During my undergraduate experience, I collaborated with a group of high school and college students to create a blog called Edúcate Utah. In it, we shared college access information, scholarship opportunities and policies relevant to undocumented immigrant students in the state. We also shared this information at churches, conferences, high schools, etc., to ensure undocumented immigrants knew about their higher education options. I met several students and families who otherwise didn’t have access to admissions and scholarship information. This was a powerful and formative experience for me. My motivation also emerges from my experience working inside and researching the hospitality industry. During college, I worked at a hotel with undocumented immigrant mujeres1 and wrote a thesis on their work experiences. Whenever I concluded interviews with my colleagues, I asked what I could do to support them. Time after time, they would say, “Yo quiero que mi hija/hijo vaya a la universidad como tú”. So essentially, my background working with undocumented immigrant students and families established my commitment to doing [HESA] type of work. Tino: My initial experience as a student in higher education was terrible. I tried an out-of-state college and received no guidance. My second attempt at higher education came several years later, but I didn’t have relationships with faculty members. My guides through the college experience were with staff members, although at the time, it felt like they were educators like faculty. They were the ones who helped me, and they helped me navigate everything, while hooking me up with scholarships and community. I think I just fell into HESA because I wanted to do this for others as well, for those who felt lonely in the process, who felt like family wasn’t around. Sharon: In many ways, I fell into this work through a series of successive inquiries. I’m always looking for what’s behind the thing that seems to be the problem, and the root causes are generally further down than we first assume. My first job in a university was as a project coordinator at the University of Michigan, a public university that had by that point become extremely privatized. In my office, I noted an extreme inequity between different categories of staff. One of my roles was also to support the person in the university in fulfilling the requirements of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). In that work, I observed a lot of resistance and colonial attitudes towards Indigenous peoples. As the layers of racial, colonial and economic injustice

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that were perpetuated in universities became clearer to me, my questions proliferated, which led me to my MA programme in HESA. There, I had great faculty and colleagues. But overall, I found that the field told a romantic story – that there was a time “before”, especially in the post– World War II “golden age”, when US higher education got it “right”. But there was very little consideration of the local and global colonial relations that had allowed US universities to accumulate the wealth and power that had enabled them to thrive. It was almost as if, in order to critique the present, we had to idealize the past. The idea that higher education was built on racial and colonial violence was not on the table. It wasn’t possible to ask, for instance, how the very idea of the “public good” that we often mobilize and celebrate is rooted in assumptions of unfettered access to Indigenous lands, the exploitation and expropriation of racialized labour and unlimited “natural resources” (i.e., environmental extraction). So, I took courses in other departments to help me make sense of these things, but I felt that for the HESA field itself there were many important questions that were not being asked, let alone answered, like why we do the things we do or why systems are set up as they are. That is what brought me to my PhD work, and to the questions I am still wrestling with today. Angie: My roots go back to being a work-study student at the advising office, at the Asian Pacific American Student Services (APASS), and being a server at the university restaurant, which led me to see the different stakeholders that make up the university. Particularly, whose voices mattered and whose didn’t. As an undergraduate student, I had questions about how the university stated they promote an equitable and inclusive learning community, when they consistently made institutional decisions that actively harm its stakeholders, based on imperialism, racism, neoliberalism and capitalism, on which centres my research interest now. Working at APASS was monumental, because I didn’t grow up learning about the politicized history of Asian American identity. This led me to higher education, because I admired those that helped me with my own political education and wanted to mentor students in a similar capacity. It wasn’t until I took a class in American Studies that I started to draw connections towards how colonial, racial capitalistic and carceral logics shape higher education. For example, I reflected on how my professional role in Residential Life consistently perpetuated surveillance and carcerality, in the guise of collective safety and student development. As I’m pursuing my PhD and thinking about research and teaching futures, I’m in a place where I want to generate more space for us to critically explore how we can collectively build capacity to resist such hegemonic power structures that are manifested through policies, practices and our ways of being.

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The Mythology of Higher Ed and Thinking Refusal

Tino: Despite being a student organizer and staging protests I find it interesting that I bought into the mythology of higher education. For instance, I felt higher education would be our means to a healthy society that meant more status and wealth. I don’t think I publicly shared that, but I inwardly believed it. However, about five or six years ago, I started working for TRIO (a US federal grant for underserved communities and educational attainment), and I realized that there’s something so wrong with the entire process. My co-workers and I would be helping droves of students to access and be enrolled on our campus, but by next year, we would experience an exodus of the same group. That was the moment when I realized there was something very wrong with all of this, and I recall reading a piece by Sharon (Stein, 2021) that drew in concepts like abolition and decolonization that also came from other scholars and really gave language to some of these feelings in the university and that’s when I reached out. However, another piece that really allowed me to push against the myth of the university as a natural social good was “Refusing the University” by Grande (2018) and that made me realize how violent this [the university] place really was and is! Alonso: In my graduate programme, I also experienced this internal conflict and political shift when I started reading critiques of settlercolonialism and thinking more deeply about how settler grammars are deeply entrenched in schools (Calderón, 2014). Although I was unfamiliar with abolitionist theory at the time, I knew that the student affairs obsession with higher education reform was wrong. I remember being in my higher education foundations class discussing school reform and not being able to get my point across about the material impossibilities of reform. So, I took out a sheet of paper, and said while crumpling it, “Reforming higher education is like crumpling up this piece of paper – no matter its new form, fundamentally, it’s still the same sheet of paper we started with. That doesn’t change”. My professor just looked at me. While I assume she and I were on the same page about the ineffectiveness of reform, she did not care to elaborate on my point. I imagine it was because of her position as an assistant professor at the time. I’m sure she needed to guard her tenure track, which also says a lot about the realities of working in higher education. That was an awakening moment for me and the realization that this simply cannot continue, which is a type of refusal – an awakening to structural violence and sitting with the “radical possibilities of displeasure” (FINSTA, 2022, 0:01). Sharon: It’s really telling how even asking these questions can be perceived as threatening. Partly I sense it’s because, at least for some people,

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there’s a layer in which they already know all of this – they know that the roots of our institutions and our fields are steeped in colonial foundations. Yet to raise the question of whether, given these roots, our institutions can be reformed, it feels like too much to hold. This may be especially difficult for those of us who not only work in but also study in higher education institutions. We as students and educators or staff in universities have so much invested in these institutions, and our whole sense of security, purpose and integrity is often wrapped up in our feelings about them. I don’t think we all assume they are unequivocally benevolent, but we want to believe that they can be reformed, if they only fulfilled the promises they make about being a space of democratic opportunity. We think: If it’s not possible to fix this thing, then why am I here? It’s hard for us to hold these layers of complexity and complicity because we want a sense of purity and hope. But I think that’s what we as a group are trying to practise, probably failing all the time. And I think more and more upcoming practitioners and scholars are already grappling with this, which speaks to refusal as a means of critique. The question is: Can the HESA field and those of us who are established within it support them to do this? Can we support them to deepen their capacities to sit with what is painful, and difficult, and contradictory? Can we disinvest from the promises of the institution and even from the desire for a promise that it can be reformed, but still be here and experiment with creative possibilities to push for more ethical forms of relationship and resource distribution, nonetheless? I think it’s possible, but we would need to first learn to do this for ourselves. We also need to learn how to be in conversation with those pushing the institution, both outside and from within, to go against its colonial imprint, instead of feeling threatened by the difficult questions they are raising. We don’t know if the university can be decolonized; maybe decolonizing higher education would mean the end of our existing institutions, or at least, they would likely be unrecognizable from the institutions that they are today. But as much as we can speculate, we can probably only know by going through the process of trying. And rather than seek to determine a fixed, idealized future, what if we were honest about just how deeply the problem goes, and focused on the integrity of the process of trying to confront that truth and enact restitution and repair for harms done? There are things that are present in our institutions that we don’t want to face, because they are uncomfortable and because they implicate us. So, we would have to start by being honest with ourselves, and perhaps by reminding ourselves that although we are certainly part of our institutions, and therefore part of the problem, we do not have to invest in their futurity, especially not their futurity in their current form.

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Disinvesting from the University as Refusal

Alonso: When I first started my work in higher education, my priority was changing the institution. Now, my investment is no longer with the institution. I simply see the institution as a source of funding and resources we can redistribute to minoritized communities (Reyna Rivarola, 2021). Knowing that my investment is no longer with the institution but with the community is empowering. I feel that the degree to which I burn out has decreased, which is interesting because I see my peers fighting tooth and nail to reform the institution, and I’m like, “It’s not worth your time and energy. Instead, focus your energy on using the institutional resources to give back to our communities”. I now choose where I spend my emotional energy and capital: in relationships and the classroom. I also see the classroom as another critical space to create vital relationships with people from our communities. Sharon: Understanding that the university is colonial doesn’t mean we stop pushing for what seems impossible and what to many is even unintelligible. Of course, you keep trying, but it’s not as disappointing when something doesn’t work. Being able to hold those contradictions and complexities is something that younger generations may be more capable of doing, because they grew up with them in ways that were harder to deny. I wonder how, in the HESA field, we can make space not just for specific conversations about decolonization and abolition but also for conversations about how we can be more accountable to these colonial institutional histories and present practices, without seeking absolution, but rather accepting that this is a lifelong process of learning and unlearning and we have not even really begun to have an honest conversation about the reparations that are owed for our colonial debts. Because if we are seeking purity, or quick fixes, then that can become another site of frustration. Like, “Well, I saw the problem and I wanted to reform it, but then I couldn’t, so what’s the point, what am I supposed to do?” And yes, this can be hard to hold, especially for white settlers like myself who benefit the most from this system and who still have the option to just go along with business as usual. But if we are fulfilling our responsibilities, then we will need to develop the capacity and the stamina to hold all that and keep moving with it. We will need to learn to walk with that responsibility, from the recognition that we have a likely unpayable debt. And rather than say, “Why bother, if we can never pay it?”, what if we said, “Okay, this is not going to go away any time soon. It’s something I need to keep with me all the time. And I don’t need to ‘fix it’ immediately because it’s not fixable. But I can try my best” and this is the space where so many of us can ask: What is the next, most responsible, small thing I can do, in whatever

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context I’m in, in order to try and open space for this conversation? How can we learn to make space for the possibility of something different, knowing that these efforts will probably fail and the only thing we can do is try to address our mistakes, learn from our failures, and then keep going? Relationality and (Un)Learning as Refusal

Angie: Who is the university accountable to, and is it necessarily to students, ultimately? Is it in our future to get rid of the border between university and the community outside of the academy? Can we start with higher education as accountable to the public, to the most marginalized people outside of the university? Think about the lives of people who are not technically “part of our institutions” in ways we engage like students with more tools, skills or resources. At times, our conversations tend to exist very insularly around abolition and decolonization. How are we redirecting our resources or partnering with organizers outside of the academy to build generative and critical connections? Alonso: As an immigrant, I must be conscious and intentional about my participation in higher education. I always ask myself and other institutional agents, “What is (y)our commitment to the land?” Especially now, when higher education institutions have adopted land acknowledgement statements left and right, we must ask ourselves this question (StewartAmbo & Yang, 2021; Wark, 2021). It is more than a simple inquiry; it’s an intervention. Another intervention is to trace our funding (revenues and expenditures) to understand institutional commitments to the land. As Ignacio Sánchez Prado shared in the podcast Latinos Who Lunch (Favela & Ortega, 2020), “ethics is a matter of your economic practices” (35:02). Thus, what are (y)our economic practices, and do they align (or not) to our land acknowledgments? Does your “land-acknowledging institution” have contracts with companies that respect the land or the people of the land? The chances are that they don’t think about it. Tino: If ethics are a matter of our economic practices, then that also translates into how we relate to one another, even land and non-human beings. Everything becomes the subject of careful study and reflection. I believe that’s where I value different knowledge and stories, particularly from Indigenous peoples. If stories are reflections of our knowledge, and if practices are enactments of such stories, then with alternative stories we could potentially (re)imagine the world? This is where some of my frustration comes with the rhetoric to burn down institutions or to just dismantle institutions, because yes, a slow burning is required, but to burn without coming to terms with the reality of such an impact on our communities is

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to approach these issues without responsibility or care. So what Alonso is mentioning compels me to ask what are the practices that allow us to reimagine? What are the stories needed that inform our reimagining of knowledge and learning? I really believe that to do so we need to carve time and space out and direct energy to discussing these things in relationship with people. We obviously have numerous examples of fugitive study or non-institutional learning such as the Combahee River Collective (a Black Feminist Lesbian organization that was active between 1974 and 1980) or the Young Lords and Black Panther liberation schools (respectively, radical revolutionary groups from the Puerto Rican diaspora and a Black power political organization), but we need to study how people have organized these spaces for knowledge outside of the university (WanzerSerrano, 2015). Sharon: In addition to spaces of learning, my sense is that we also need practices of unlearning (Kapoor, 2004). These colonial institutions and systems are imprinted within all of us, and while I don’t want to individualize systemic things at the expense of losing sight of the structural, because of this imprint, we often replicate colonial patterns even when we remove ourselves from the institution. For those of us who benefit from colonialism in some way, even when we have a critique of it, we often remain invested in the things that colonialism promises us. Colonialism is delicious for those it benefits; they designed it that way. There are so many enjoyable things about it that tempt us to forget about the huge cost to people and the planet. Once you start to see those costs, it becomes harder to enjoy, but it doesn’t mean we can just stop all of the colonial patterns we are socialized into intellectual patterns, relational patterns, affective patterns and economic patterns. If we are going to have the possibility of something truly different, then we will need to be able to trace those patterns in ourselves and notice ourselves doing it, as much as we notice the university doing it. I do see that in some alternative spaces, including my own, where instead of being invested in the university we become tempted to invest in the alternative and thereby risk losing sight of the need to critique what we’re doing as well, because it’s all kind of an experiment and we’re still learning and unlearning. Along this journey, there will be the repetition of old patterns, there will be new harmful patterns, there will be a lot of interesting, important learnings and even successes, but there will also be failures. So how do we hold all of that? Sometimes in the move away from the current security of the flawed institutions we have, we want a replacement security. Maybe if we said we don’t actually know yet how to do this differently, and we’ll never really know because it’s an ongoing process and we need to keep learning from our mistakes and from our successes and like not invest in this or that experiment being “it” but rather investing in the

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quality and integrity of relationships, investing in the practice of un/learning to be different and trying to be more responsible and accountable to all living beings. Knowing also that we’re going to constantly fail and not beating ourselves up about it, but also not letting ourselves off the hook. Alonso: I really like that. When I read the work of Manulani Aluli Meyer (2013) on holographic epistemology, I was astounded by the line, “We communicate through our world view shaped within knowledge systems prioritized by the needs of people and the lessons of place” (p. 94). I believe that in doing this work, we must join forces with more people who share world views that strive for decolonial presents and futures. It is not enough to write about the work; we must be willing to act upon the word (Simpson, 2014a, 2014b). (Beyond) Romanticizing Communities as Refusal

Angie: I reflect often on Grace Lee Boggs’ (2012) quote about movements, and they are developed out of critical connections versus mass growth. Examining complex relationality became highly salient for me in the context of anti-Asian violence. When the shooting happened in Atlanta in March 2021 (2021 shooting that targeted Asian bodies in Atlanta, Georgia) and there was an increased surge of anti-Asian violence in NYC, a collective of Asian American staff emerged to discuss community safety in NYC and to advocate for policies around the need to commute. I immediately noticed that there were folks from different corners of the university – from hospitality to student affairs to academic support staff – who have never interacted with one another, which was exciting. I also noticed that there were head of Campus Safety, HR, and the President’s Office. I entered this space with a bit of scepticism after seeing the leadership, but also hope, because we thought this was an opportunity to connect and mobilize towards justice. But then, during the meeting, the facilitators just dove right in and gave the leadership with the most space to talk – not even hello, how are you, what department are you working? My colleagues and I mentioned that if we need safety, we need safety for everyone – Black, trans, Latinx folks in our community. We shouldn’t promote safety at the expense of other folks of colour. There was such a disconnect in terms of understanding why we should not trust the police, all the while feeling this immense collective sadness that we haven’t even processed yet. The facilitators then treated us like we’re trying to dampen their movement and almost saying, “we’re not Asian enough” by speaking up for other communities of colour. So there was a lot of misalignment even within our own diasporic community, and when we think about shifting relationalities in higher education, we need to start with our own community and

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identifying collective needs. How do we begin by asking what do we want to be true in the future for our community – whether it is our collective safety or to show up for each other? What do we need from each other to feel safe in the future – without the head of Campus Safety, HR, or the president – who don’t even know us? How do we even begin to engage them, if our community is not even aligned? Folks tend to jump a hundred steps ahead before investing in time to build critical connections, and, to me, community needs to be a critical mass of critical connections – naming who is in the room and taking the time to get to know each other and each other’s needs and understanding how we are impacted by our collective interdependencies. Conclusion and Reflections

This dialogic piece is an attempt to begin a conversation within a field entrenched in the university’s systemic reality of interpersonal, psychological and epistemic violence and demonstrating what refusal as a concept has inspired in us and asserting that vision for higher education. It requires an ongoing practice of coming to terms with the violence of higher education systems and the complex positionalities of educators and practitioners within HESA that are engaged in good acts through the institution and, at the same time, maintaining its structural violences. However, it has also called attention to relational aspirations and decolonial opportunities available in (un)learning, which can offer possibilities for praxis. This piece formed in the backdrop of expanded justice movements such as Black Lives Matter, #LandBack, an ongoing global pandemic, war, climate change and the possible dissolution of the modern/colonial university as we know it. This is not to say that we are not hopeful because as moments of crisis emerge, so do generative possibilities, including those that respond to abolitionist and decolonial aspirations of (re)imaging and remaking the university, or knowledge exchange and higher learning. Inspired by the logics of refusal that Indigenous political thought and the Black radical tradition have theorize/d, we find possibility in dissolution as refusal because it will allow us to “see more and see differently” (cite: Mayorga, Leidecker, & Gutierrez, 2019, p. 103) and not just as individuals but in relationship to one another. Note 1 As the authors, we have decided to respect and reflect the original language used in the dialogue; if the reader is a monolingual English speaker and invested in the content of this manuscript and understanding further, they can use their resources to translate the text as they see fit.

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References Ahmed, S. (2012). On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional life. Duke University Press. Ambo, T. (2018). Caregiving as refusal in the academy. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 31(3), 215–222. Bhungalia, L. (2020). Laughing at power: Humor, transgression, and the politics of refusal in Palestine. EPC: Politics and Space, 38(3), 387–404. https://doi. org/10.1177/2399654419874368 Boggs, G. L., & Kurashige, S. (2012). The next American revolution: Sustainable activism for the twenty-first century. Univ of California Press. Calderón, D. (2014). Uncovering settler grammars in curriculum. Educational Studies, 50(4), 313–338. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131946.2014.926904 Capper, C. A. (2015). The 20th-year anniversary of critical race theory in education: Implications for leading to eliminate racism. Educational Administration Quarterly, 51(5), 791–833. Favela, J., & Ortega, E. (Executive Producers). (2020, September 24). Dr. Sánchez Prado, Mexican food & the legacies of Bayless and Kennedy (No. 173) [Audio podcast episode]. In Latinos Who Lunch. http://www.latinoswholunch.com/ episodes/2020/9/24/dr-snchez-prado-mexican-food-amp-the-legacy-ofbayless-and-kennedy Ferguson, R. A. (2017). We demand: The university and student protests (Vol. 1). Univ of California Press. FINSTA. (2022). KILLJOY [Song]. On CUNTYGRRRL [Album]. Finsta. Gaston-Gayles, J. L., Wolf-Wendel, L. E., Tuttle, K. N., Twombly, S. B., & Ward, K. (2005). From disciplinarian to change agent: How the civil rights era changed the roles of student affairs professionals. NASPA Journal, 42(3), 263–282. Grande, S. (2018). Refusing the university. In Toward What Justice? (pp. 47–65). Routledge. Grosfoguel, R. (2013). The structure of knowledge in westernised universities: Epistemic racism/sexism and the four genocides/epistemicides. Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge, 1(1), 73–90. Harms, H. E. (1970). A history of the concept of in loco parentis in American education. University of Florida. Kapoor, I. (2004). Hyper-self-reflexive development? Spivak on representing the Third World ‘Other’. Third World Quarterly, 25(4), 627–647. Kelley, R. D. (2016). Black study, Black struggle. The Boston Review. Retrieved from http://bostonreview.net/forum/robin-d-g-kelley-black-study-black-struggle Krone, M. (2021, October 12). To those who have stayed. [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://medium.com/@megankrone/to-those-who-have-stayed-5caf6a1ab7bd Mayorga, E., Leidecker, L., & de Gutierrez, D. O. (2019). Burn it down: The incommensurability of the university and decolonization. Journal of Critical Thought and Praxis, 8(1), 87–106. McNair, T. B., Albertine, S., Cooper, M. A., McDonald, N., & Major Jr, T. (2016). Becoming a student-ready college: A new culture of leadership for student success. John Wiley & Sons. Meyer, M. A. (2013). Holographic epistemology: Native common sense. China Media Research, 9(2), 94–101.

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Meyerhoff, E. (2019). Beyond education: Radical studying for another world. U of Minnesota Press. Mitchell, N. (2015). (Critical ethnic studies) intellectual. Critical Ethnic Studies, 1(1), 86–94. Naepi, S., Stein, S., Ahenakew, C., & Andreotti, V. D. O. (2017). A cartography of higher education: Attempts at inclusion and insights from Pasifika scholarship in Aotearoa New Zealand. In C. Reids & J. Major (Eds.), Global teaching: Southern perspectives on teachers working with diversity (pp. 81–99). Palgrave Macmillan, New York. Patton, A. L. (2016). Who wrote the books: A history of the history of student affairs. Journal of Critical Scholarship on Higher Education and Student Affairs, 3(1), 5. Reyna Rivarola, A. R. (2021, November 30). (Un)studied complicity: Cross-examining undocumented immigrant student participation in the U.S. education system. My Undocumented Life. https://mydocumentedlife.org/2021/11/30/ unstudied-complicity-cross-examining-undocumented-immigrant-studentparticipation-in-the-u-s-education-system/ Saunders, D. B. (2010). Neoliberal ideology and public higher education in the United States. Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, 8(1), 41–77. Sepulveda, C. (2020). To decolonize Indigenous lands, we must also abolish police and prisons. Truthout. Truthout, October, 13. Shotwell, A. (2016). Against purity: Living ethically in compromised times. University of Minnesota Press. Simpson, A. (2014a). Mohawk interruptus. Duke University Press. Simpson, L. B. (2014b). Land as pedagogy: Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellious transformation. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 3(3), 1–25. Stein, S. (2021). What can decolonial and abolitionist critiques teach the field of higher education? The Review of Higher Education, 44(3), 387–414. Stewart-Ambo, T., & Yang, K. W. (2021). Beyond land acknowledgment in settler institutions. Social Text, 39(1), 21–46. Wanzer-Serrano, D. (2015). The New York young lords and the struggle for liberation. Temple University Press. Wark, J. (2021). Land acknowledgements in the academy: Refusing the settler myth. Curriculum Inquiry, 51(2), 191–209. Wolf-Wendel, L. E., Twombly, S. B., Tuttle, K. N., Ward, K., & Gaston-Gayles, J. L. (2004). Reflecting back, looking forward: Civil rights and student affairs. NASPA.

8 PLASTIC REFUSALS The Africanization Challenge of South African Higher Education André Keet, Michaela Ann Penkler, Luan Staphorst, Joseph Besigye Bazirake, and Daniella Rafaely

Introduction

The university as an institution is inherently plastic and transformative (Keet, 2019), as are the social agents within it. Yet, the institution, with its sense of stability, reproduction, institutional culture and permanency, seems to be alienated from its own plasticity (Malabou, 2005/2009) and its meanings of “mutability, change, exchange, morphing, metamorphosis, transformation” (Galloway, 2012, p. 10). But, the “university is also a criminal, key in an emerging form of global, racial capitalism […] rather than an innocent institution for the common good” (Undercommoning collective, 2016, para. 2). As a “criminal neoliberal and neocolonial institution”, the university should be “abolished and reinvented” (ibid), plastically exploded, annihilated. Yet, the university can also be thought of as an “institution engaged with a kind of immanent thought that materially grounds its potential metamorphoses” (Bhandar & Goldberg-Hiller, 2015, p. 1). The university’s criminality is derived from two sources. First, its function within the broader matrix of racial capitalism and its attachment to a modern/colonial imaginary (Stein, 2021) steers its anti-social justice inclinations. Second, how the practices ensuing from this imaginary undercut the transformative capacity and plasticity of the university, eroding the promise of Africanization and decolonization. Because of this, refusing the university sector as a system seems to be the only possible alternative option. Not only because our colonial investment in it requires radical disruption but also because refusal may unburden the “Africanization” debate, which has been a hushed, nervous and reserved affair in the DOI: 10.4324/9781003367314-11

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emergence of the “new” South Africa post-1994, with a few flare-ups here and there. That is, we are not encountering an Africanization – the quest to “better locate Africa and Africans in knowledge” (Ratele, 2019, p. 53) – in South African universities as a coherent, demonstrable programme. It seems unthinkable, undoable. What can we do, and how should we think amidst the overwhelming forces that structure the university as a criminal? That is, how, against its genetic coding, can we picture the university as a transformative social justice agent? In this chapter, we modestly offer the notion of plastic refusals, located within the triad of decolonial-, abolitionist- and refusal-related critiques of the university, as an interpretive scheme for thinking about the radical-transformative potential and options that may be resident within the South African higher education sector by which the Africanization debate can be animated. A brief historical overview of the South African higher education system, explaining its race-based, modern/colonial and Apartheid character within which the ideals of Africanization are imprisoned, provides the backdrop for our arguments. Bringing refusal together with decolonial and abolitionist critiques of the university, we then build the notion of plastic refusals as inherent to universities and necessary for transformative praxes as an unobtrusive possibility for thinking Africanization. This work, from our perspective, is an attempt at writing shared complicities,1 understood as the way in which history apportions guilt and responsibility for social injustices proportionally and differentially, yet leaving no one and nothing untouched. To be clear, this does not imply an equalization of guilt and responsibility, and when we write as a “mixed” team, we are well aware of its differential distribution within this collective itself. Within our writing collective, the question of positionality – together with the various demands and responsibility it engenders – is both dispersed and entangled. The complex “we”-ness of the collaboration both intensifies and defers notions of responsibility, accountability, complicity and specificity. We operate within the parameters of Decentred Critical University Studies (DCUS) to locate our writing both as politics and scholarship, and work, on the one hand, for instance against the anti-Black racism of whites, coloureds and Indians2 which we observe in our institutions, and the convergence of black and white conservativisms within universities on the other. Working with these kinds of themes, our collaboration is thus a site of continued formation, in service of both the formenting of refusal and the animation of the plastic relative to identity, knowledge and praxes, inclusive of the refusal of ourselves, which is one of the arguments we make in this chapter, within the context of the Africanization debate.

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Africanization and the South African Higher Education

South Africa’s public higher education sector today consists of 26 higher education institutions, including 11 traditional universities, 6 comprehensive universities and 8 universities of technology. In general, traditional universities offer scholarly degrees, while universities of technology offer vocational degrees, and comprehensive universities offer a combination of scholarly and vocational programmes. The differentiation of South Africa’s higher education landscape is largely a function of its history, in which higher education was utilized as an ideological tool for the reproduction of the apartheid social order (Badat, 2015). Prior to 1994, there were 36 higher education institutions in South Africa, organized according to race and further differentiated according to function and geographical location. For example, 19 higher education institutions were designated for whites, 2 for Indians, 2 for coloureds and 6 for black Africans (Bunting, 2006). There were an additional seven institutions for black Africans in the four independent “homelands”. These 36 institutions were managed by eight separate government departments. Students could apply for a ministerial permit to study at an institution designated for a different race if they could show that their proposed programme was not available at their own designated institution. White universities and Technikons were further differentiated into Afrikaans-language and English-language institutions which were generally on opposite ends of Apartheid’s ideological spectrum. These institutions made use of the ministerial permits to enrol black students: in 1990, 28% of enrolled students were either black African, coloured or Indian (Bunting, 2006). Black universities and Technikons (for black African, Indian, and coloured students) were instrumental institutions that furthered Apartheid’s project by training black people to serve as teachers in the black school system (“Bantu education”) and the civil service. These institutions were woefully under-resourced; they were relegated to rural and remote areas; their staff had fewer qualifications than their white counterparts at historically African universities (HAUs) and did not enjoy the white universities’ access to well-resourced administrative and financial systems. In 1994, the new democratic government inherited a higher education landscape that “ranged from the conventional to the barely functional” (Hall, 2015, p. 146), with the entire system shaped by the irrational and exclusionary policies of the previous government (CHE, 2000). The system included ten historically disadvantaged (black) universities and seven historically disadvantaged (black) Technikons; ten historically advantaged (white) universities and seven historically advantaged (white) Technikons; as well as two distance education institutions for all races. As Badat (2015, p. 178)

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notes, the challenge was “for the inherited higher education institutions to be recognised as South African institutions, embraced as such, transformed where necessary, and put to work for and on behalf of all South Africans”. The merging and combination of institutions resulted in the establishment of three types of institutions of higher education: traditional universities, universities of technology, and comprehensive universities. These mergers reduced the number of institutions from 36 to 23, with 12 institutions left untouched by the process (Hall, 2015). The merging of institutions has resulted in a heterogeneous and differentiated higher education landscape that is, nevertheless, still contoured by the legacy of Apartheid (Badat, 2015; Hall, 2015). In early 1994, there were 525,000 students enrolled in HE institutions: 47% of students were white, 40% were black Africans, 7% were Indian and 6% were coloured; 49% of black students were enrolled in historically disadvantaged institutions (HDIs), and 38% were enrolled in distance institutions. Only 13% of black students were enrolled in historically white institutions (HWIs) (CHE, 2004). Over the last two decades, the proportion of white students has correspondingly dropped in relation to the increased number of black African, coloured and Indian students that have entered institutions of higher learning. Today, groups are represented far more equitably in higher education. For example, in 2019, there were 1,074,912 students enrolled in higher education institutions in South Africa. Of these, 77% were black African students, 12% were white students, 6% were coloured students and 4% were Indian students. This reflects, fairly accurately, the racial demographics in the country (DHE, 2019) and suggests that South Africa has, at least in terms of enrolment numbers, succeeded in transforming the higher education landscape. Though a series of reports (CHE, 2004, 2016; SAHRC, 2016) over the past 15 years lament the slow pace of university transformation in South Africa, some shifts in the system have been remarkable. The establishment of a single unitary arrangement of 26 public universities, from a fragmented and structurally racialized system of 36 public institutions in 1994 to a relatively more integrated formation of public universities (traditional, comprehensive and universities of technology), is one example. Other shifts include a dramatic increase in access for poor, black students and advancing equity within the academy. However, the system remains racialized and discriminatory in various respects (CHE, 2016; SAHRC, 2016), curriculum reform is limited and the knowledge project is virtually untouched. In essence, the South African university, as an institution, continues to be steeped in its Eurocentric traditions, acutely connected to its modern/ colonial and Apartheid heritage and disaffiliated from the Continent.

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In fact, the discussion on the post-Apartheid and postcolonial university has grown mute, and the ideas of the African university and Africanization are hermetically sealed in the vision and mission statements of universities, nothing more. Though focusing on South Africa in this chapter, the critique offered by the triad of decolonial, abolitionist and refusal theories, so we argue, is applicable to global higher education. And within these critiques, the politico-epistemological project of Africanization may take better shape. Where do we start? With ourselves, we suggest – as argued later on in this chapter – stepping away from our presumption of innocence and accepting our complicity and criminality within the system (see Stein, 2021, p. 405). In a sense, it is about refusing ourselves: our real institutional and individual selves clearly lack the intuitive flair and political commitment for the Africanization undertaking. This may be the result of a university sector that carries a colonial/Apartheid heritage, and that has, in spirit and episteme, been amputated from the body of Africa. Though higher education policy and legislation acknowledge this dissociation and have provided pathways that could ignite the Africanization discourse within the university sector, a sustained conversation has not been undertaken in any meaningful way. To a large extent, this failure may be ascribed to underestimating just how extensively the South African system was moulded on the character of the modern African university, whose form and function themselves derived from the modern/colonial project and its “civilising mission” (Mamdani, 2019, p. 17). The Humboldtian model (Mamdani, 2019), its curriculum and scholarly subject matter had roots in European Enlightenment, with the result that the “modern university in Africa has very little to do with what existed on this continent before colonialism, and everything to do with what was created in modern Europe” (Mamdani, 2019, p. 17). In South Africa, we have not yet sufficiently considered the nature of the post-Apartheid and postcolonial university and its location on the Continent. As such, the question of Africanizing the university, or locating the university as African, has not been pursued in any purposeful way. As the system, with its peculiar colonial/Apartheid heritage, also suffers a deliberate detachment from the life of the Continent, the foreignness of Africa to the South African academy is palpable. In addition, the South African sector was modelled in design, administration, governance, orientation and knowledge after the Eurocentric university. And its curriculum, collaborations, staff and knowledge exchanges followed the well-established colonial routes and conduits, some of which have been steadfastly maintained in the present-day South African academy.

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Yet, the facility to generate alternative and Africa-focused pathways is always resident within the higher education sector. That is because the university’s plasticity – “the triple movement of receiving, giving, and destroying form” (Kellogg, 2015, p. 111) – is constituted by an ecology of plastic social agents, who, if they can gain “consciousness of their own plastic potentialities, “produce the conditions for a new world of questioning,” a new capacity for revolt” (Malabou 2004/2008, p. 54). This capacity has its home in the brain because “to talk about the plasticity of the brain means to see in it not only the creator and receiver of form but also an agency of disobedience to every constituted form, a refusal to submit to a model” (Malabou, 2004/2008, p. 6). This is what we refer to as plastic refusals; one can say this is the plastic refusal of the plastic university, with the possibility of destroying and undoing the self in the process of self-reconfiguration. The self-destruction inherent in this refusal is important: the requirement for the deep, authentic, decolonial work that strips us of the privileges and security of the university is a work against the self, a form of self-annihilation. Crucially, it is often here, at the cusp of self-annihilation, that the radical change project often falters, where we retreat into the perceived comforts of the university itself. Consequently, in material, affective and epistemic terms, we – the radical, activist academics – are not authentically shifting. Yet, we ironically, at a distance from ourselves, petition for such shifts from the structures which we co-constitute. When all is said and done, transformation as plastic refusals is, at a deep level, the work of the self and its interface with structure. One cannot flee oneself (Bhandar & Goldberg-Hiller, 2015, p.15). And through these self-transformative processes, one may reach a point of resistance – refusal. Refusal

Grande’s (2018) seminal and instructive piece, Refusing the University3 not only provides the analytics for working against the colonial character of higher education but also suggests key strategies for a radical politic of refusal to take shape. In a sense, a key consideration for the praxis of refusal is the impossibility of changing the neoliberal track of the university, a system consistently made and remade through global forces that entrench and legitimize the cultures of capitalist accumulations and corporate rationalities that mobilize us all into its machinery. That is, we acknowledge that substantively transforming the university is nearly unthinkable and undoable within an almost impossible situation, yet we keep working towards “redemptive and recuperative possibilities”, as Martel (2011, p. 57) would argue: first, in relation to Fanon’s impossible

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revolution (ibid, p. 190), and, second, in relation to Benjamin’s proposition that “our subjection to and participation in the phantasmagoria can become the basis for resistance” (ibid, p. 26). The “methodological disengagement from and refusal of the Establishment”, as argued by Marcuse (in Forman, 2017, p. 29), has aligned with Davis’ (2020) work on human rights-related social movements and decolonization in ways that provide for solidaristic connections between the praxes of refusal and the activist and scholarly work of the “Black Radical Tradition”. This tradition is described by Robinson (2000, p. xxx) as “an accretion, over generations, of collective intelligence gathered from struggle” from the slave period to the present through various historical epochs. Sinha (2017), with analytical dexterity, connects the “Black Radical Tradition” to the abolition movements by examining various waves of resistance that began with the first slave rebellions and that germinated the abolitionist ideology. Correspondingly, Harney and Moten (2013) bring together the undercommons as a place of meaning-making in homelessness for those who “cannot own” with “the right to refuse what has been refused to you” (Halberstam, 2013, p. 8), that is, in this instance, to refuse the university. The Undercommoning Collective (2016, para. 3) understands the university today as “a key institution of an emerging form of global, racial capitalism […] rather than an innocent institution for the common good”. As a “criminal neoliberal and neocolonial institution”, the university should be “abolished and reinvented” (ibid). Yet, an abolitionist approach to the university rests on a “new abolitionism – a positive, world-making one” that lurks in the university’s undercommons (Boggs et al., 2019, para. 5). This reading of abolition is not the “elimination of anything” (ibid), but rather a mode of “approaching our study of and relationship to such institutions through a combination of social critique and a willingness to struggle to think and build the impossible” (ibid, para. 7). The conceptual entanglement between abolition and refusal is strongly articulated in Harney and Moten (2013), whilst Boggs et al. (2019) favour a more self-determining formulation of abolition in their articulation of an invitation to Abolitionist University Studies. Grande (2018, p. 47), on the one hand, is “particularly interested in examining the relationship between abolitionist and decolonial theorizations of the academy as articulated through Black radicalism and critical Indigenous studies”, and she does so under the broader rubric of a theory and politics of refusal. Joining refusal, abolition, and decolonization thinking together, Grande (2018, p. 51) sets up an interpretive scheme for engaging the Indigenous, the Black and the Condemned to explore the development of solidarities among marginalized groups “with a shared commitment to working

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beyond the imperatives of capital and the settler state”. More importantly, this scheme allows us to consider the “critical distinctions between the decolonial struggle for Indigenous sovereignty – shaped by genocide, erasure, and dispossession - and radical projects for abolition – shaped by enslavement, exclusion, and oppression” (ibid). The significance of Grande’s analyses for the South African context lies in the direction it provides for engaging the complexities of the atypical settler state (see Madlingozi, 2017) and the contextual, vernacular question of the Indigenous and the Black. Moreover, it points to the shortcomings associated with the dominant South African paradigm of recognition-based and inclusivity-driven transformation. Very little critical scholarly work on university change from this angle has been done in South Africa as our intellectual trajectories on transformation have been streamed through the prism of rights and inclusivity and the notions of consensus and deliberative democracy. That there may be something fundamentally limiting about recognition-, inclusion-, diversity-, deliberation- and human rights-steered reforms is a prospect that seldom enters our engagements, let alone our scholarly imaginations. Yet, these frameworks, historically produced, are the immovable receivable categories within which we locate our transformation work; they steer our assumptions of change. For this very reason, Africanization has remained a background reference point that had its last burst of attention in the sector during the #MustFall student protests of 2015–20164. Jansen and Walters (2022, pp. 97–103) reflect productively on the complexities of meanings of Africanization that crystallized in the sector in the aftermath of the student protests. We are biased towards Ratele’s (2019, p. 53) conception of Africanization, or African-centredness, as the quest to “better locate Africa and Africans in knowledge” and to “produce ideas that are disalienating for a meaningful life in Africa”, linking this conception to the nature of the post-Apartheid and postcolonial university, and its location on the Continent. And, on the basis of these (largely neglected) positions, we argue that the Africanization debate is muted. Instead, what surfaces, from time to time, are frivolous, inconsequential “chats” on the Africanization of universities, which are, to our minds, a function of what Jansen (2019, p. 61) refers to as the “dearth of inventive curriculum theory”, and the “absence of vibrant, original and creative knowledge production systems in [South] Africa”. The mimicking of an “imported” decolonization discourse, imprisoned by a politics of recognition on the South African higher education landscape, is an inevitable consequence of this critical lack of engagement. That is, instead of doing “real” decolonizing knowledge work like that of

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Magadla et al. (2021) and Mkhize et al. (2022), the sector seems to have opted for a “noisy”, new transformation trope. Yet, as Jansen (2019) reminds us, a deeper dive and mapping of Africanization and decolonization work across the South African university sector will confirm many examples of creative, thoughtful, productive and socially useful work. Plastic Refusals

Central to Malabou’s diverse and interdisciplinary philosophical writings is the concept of plasticity. The concept emerged in her early work, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, and Dialectic, and was initially defined as “at once capable of receiving and of giving form” (Malabou, 2005, 2010, p. 8). This state of simultaneous emergence and dissolution of form is reworked and expanded upon through engagement with varying, polar disciplines and provides “a unique contribution to contemporary philosophy, one that both bridges and works between all these distinct and very different traditions” (James, 2022, p. i). What follows is an exploration of how Malabou expands her initial concept of plasticity to its most recent elaboration as an innate ability that “informs the capacity of forms to be exchanged or transformed from one regime to another” (James, 2022, p. ii). Plasticity, as demonstrated by Malabou, is a means of relational, transdisciplinary thinking that gives us the ability “to think the continuity and possibilities of transition between biological and symbolic life” (ibid). In her first book5, Malabou reads Hegel’s philosophy and argues for the relevance of his thinking to contemporary thought by reworking the concept of plasticity. In Hegelian thought, plasticity is “the capacity to comply with the dialectical dynamic proper to both life and thought” (de Boer, 2004, p. 287). Reworked, the dialectic becomes a process of plasticity, the capacity to be determined from within and without, to give and receive form. Recentring the Hegelian system around the “unruly creative-destructive logic” (Dalton, 2019, p. 238) of plasticity, Malabou demonstrates that the system is “malleable and dynamitic in its openness to the new and the unforeseen” (ibid, p. 239) – the antithesis of established Hegelian readings. From this introduction of plasticity as a central principle in philosophical thought, Malabou goes on to engage with psychoanalysis6 and neuroscience7. In these transdisciplinary engagements, Malabou refines the concept of plasticity by carefully differentiating it from elasticity and flexibility. Elasticity denotes change that is temporary, that reverts to its original form. Flexibility speaks to the ability to adapt to changing circumstances to “mould ourselves responsively to the external demands and pressures” (James, 2022, p. vi). In both cases, change or transformation is linear:

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there is a point where transformation begins and ends (and perhaps begins again). Plasticity, by contrast, is indeterminant; transformation in terms of plasticity has a multidirectional trajectory, yet no point of origin and no end. Plasticity is described as having explosive potential: on the one hand, the power to rupture form and reveal dormant possibilities that are formative and constructive; on the other hand, destructive and deforming power. In What Should We Do with Our Brain? (2004/2008), Malabou links developments in neuroscience to contemporary culture and politics (Leys, 2011; Bhandar & Goldberg-Hiller, 2011). The resultant analysis highlights the tendency in neuroscience to focus solely on the constructive plasticity of the brain, resulting in a field that has limited itself to thinking in terms of flexibility. This tendency towards flexibility (or the ability to adjust to external pressures) is noticeable in culture and, particularly, politics. In arguing for a comprehensive understanding of plasticity, to acknowledge and harness “its potential for indeterminacy and creativity” (Leys, 2011, para. 2), Malabou suggests that to answer her book title’s question, we should “refuse to be flexible individuals who combine a permanent control of the self with a capacity to self-modify at the whim of fluxes, transfers, and exchanges, for fear of explosion” (Malabou, 2004/2008, p. 78). Malabou circles back to the discipline of philosophy in Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing (2005/2010) to rework Derridean deconstruction by shifting focus from “arche-writing, graphic inscription, and the ‘trace’ to the question of form and the manner in which forms survive their deconstruction and both persist or are transformed in excess of any logic or possibility of self-identity or presence” (James, 2022, p. iii). This development in deconstruction within the context of Malabou’s transdisciplinary engagements set the scene for her reading of Heideggerian ontology and destruction. The Heidegger Change (2004/2011) “render[s] him unrecognisable in relation to any existing ‘Heideggerianism’ and as a thinker of the transformability of ontological regimes” (James, 2022, p. iv). The conclusion put forward in this book is that “being”, and our thinking thereon, is plastic. In Malabou’s more recent expansion and refinement of plasticity, she engages with epigenetics and technology8. Research in genetics supports the proposition that phenotype changes are not reliant on alterations in the DNA sequence, meaning organisms are not solely defined by their DNA. Malabou examines recent epigenetic research in the framework of Kant’s pure reason and posits that philosophy’s transcendental is plastic by conceiving it as “organic tissue, mutable and unanchored” (Dalton, 2019, p. 239). Malabou’s engagements with technology explore and question the future forms of plasticity being synthesised by advancements in biotechnology and technoscience, hinting at transitions/collisions between

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concrete and abstract forms (Dalton, 2019; James, 2022), as seen in Morphing Intelligence (2017/2019). Again, Malabou bridges the perceived disciplinary divide and presents us with an upside-down, inside-out view of enduring philosophical thought intercalated within scientific enquiry. In Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing, Malabou (2005/2010) declares the book a portrait of the concept of plasticity, generally viewed as her signature concept, which, as stated earlier, refers to “mutability, change, exchange, morphing, metamorphosis, transformation” (Galloway, 2012, p. 10) and the “triple movement of receiving, giving and destroying form” (Kellogg, 2015, p. 111). Although plasticity is an endless process that has no inclination to be determined, its philosophical, political, social and academic implications allow us to question determinacy and claim freedom through refusal to be moulded by contextual structures and instead allow for agency to give form to those very structures that impose on us. Plasticity, argues Malabou (2005/2010, pp. 7, 9), refers both to “the spontaneous organization of fragments” and to a “structure of transformation and destruction of presence and the present”. When we speak of plasticity, therefore, we speak of the structure of the possible – the structure of transformation conscious of its fragmentary ontology yet resolute in futurity, transformability and change. Malabou’s theorization of plasticity has become a highly generative concept – one that has led to numerous interpretations and disciplinary appropriations (see, for example, Bhandar & Goldberg-Hiller, 2015; Dalton, 2019; Hogstad, 2020; Hope, 2014; Keet, 2014a, 2014b, 2019; Maggiore, 2019). We also read Malabou’s conception alongside the use of the terms “plastic” and “plasticity” by Mbembe (2013/2017a, 2019, 2010/2021). In a 2018 interview with Goldberg on Critique of Black Reason, Mbembe (in Goldberg, 2018, p. 226) notes, during a reflection on “compositional logics” and the “full inhabitation of the world, an embrace of its contradiction”, that it’s not exactly what some call plasticity, although plasticity is involved in it. But it’s really a kind of radical openness to all kinds of knowledges and the disposition towards the encounter with the unknown. The determination to go in search of the unknown. That’s what it is; that’s what the African continental archive brings to these discussions. Mbembe, in thinking through the compositionality of a full being in the world, notes that this has a relationship with plasticity. Turning to Critique of Black Reason (Mbembe, 2013/2017a, pp. 4, 133), we would argue, provides greater clarity as to what he means by plasticity, the link

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between plasticity and subjectivity, and how these meanings can be generative in our conception of critical plasticity: “This subject is plastic and perpetually called on to reconfigure itself in relation to the artefacts of the age”; “[the] human figure is by definition plastic. The human subject par excellence is the one who is capable of becoming another, someone other than himself, a new person”. We see herein the notion of possible-subjectivity, of the movement towards an externality of the atomistic self, a movement beyond the self – both to another, or another, and to the “artefacts of the age”. When this statement of the inherent plasticity of the subject is read alongside Mbembe’s notion of a “radical openness to all kinds of knowledges”, plasticity becomes more than an ontological theorization, as Malabou’s usage attests to, and rather includes an attitudinal, or dispositional, slant. Reflecting on Malabou’s and Mbembe’s conceptions of plasticity, we present plasticity as an onto-ethical conception of, and towards, knowledge – a radical openness towards knowledge and transformation that acknowledges and works with inherent fragmentation. Mbembe (2013/2017a, pp. 143–144) offers another conceptual hook through which plasticity could be meaningfully conceptualized. Whilst he links the plastic explicitly to subjectivity, he speaks of the materiality of the body, of the physicality of being in the world, to the concept of the assemblage: “The body, here, is an anatomical reality, an assemblage of organs, each with a specific function. As such, it is not the basis of any kind of singularity that would enable one to declare once and for all, absolutely: ‘I possess my body’”. The assemblage, and assemblage-thinking, is a cornerstone of Deleuzoguattarian thought on becoming. It refers to an understanding of being inherently fragmentary, yet held together by the coming-together of those fragments. It is, therefore, plastic in the sense of Malabou’s conception of the term. What this conceptual hook offers, then, is an opportunity to regard the link between knowledge, subjectivity and the materiality of being as an assemblage, as plastic, with the opportunity for a radical reassembling, or de- and re-territorialization in Deleuzoguattarian terms. Yet, these transformative capacities are smothered by our own desires and investments in the modern/colonial university, overlaid by structures and practices that govern the subject as an interplay of structuration processes, social practices and subjective desires. In Requiem for the Slave, Mbembe (2013/2017b, p. 129) sketches the “Black Man” as a plastic subject who “suffered a process of transformation through destruction”. In the brutality of slavery and the savagery of colonial oppression, the skin of the “Black Man, despised and dishonoured, […] has been transformed into the form and spirit of merchandise – the living crypt of capital”. Yet, the “Black Man” is also its own inversion,

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“buoyant and plastic, fully engaged in the act of creation” (ibid, p. 6). An ethico-political responsibility is emerging here. If the face of “transformation through destruction” is historically and in the main black, politically speaking, solidarity requires at least a serious attempt at transformative self-annihilation in our attempts at working against institutions within which “Africanization”, in Ratele’s 2019 sense, takes the figure of the perpetual Black fugitive (Harney & Moten, 2013). Can there be a refusal of institutions and other things, untouched by this knowledge, this knowing? And by extension, can refusal be enacted independently of the suffering of the Indigenous, the Black and the Condemned? Subtly, and without condemnation, Malabou (Bhandar & GoldbergHiller, 2015, p. 1) asks us to see each institution “engaged with a kind of immanent thought that materially grounds its potential metamorphoses” based on our own ethico-political responsibility for self-transformation given our “unused” plastic capacities. “The form of thought today, she argues, is ontologically plastic; self-transformation is built into our bodies, it suffuses our possible readings of philosophy, and it promises us new perspectives on political and social change” (ibid). Is it not possible, given the South African universities’ dissociation with Africa – we are not referring to partnerships, research collaborations, and neocolonial higher education sorties into the Continent – that Africanization, as we define it in this chapter, presupposes a refusal of the universityas-such9 that is beyond what our matrix of self-interest can allow? It is perhaps a bridge too far since it will implode our sense of self as socialjustice practitioners within the university, incapable of imagining that our own complicity demands radical self-transformations through plastic refusals. Within the context of self-transformations, Helberg (2020, p. 588) provides an interesting comparison between Butler’s notion of performativity and Malabou’s signature concept of plasticity. Both Catherine Malabou’s conception of plasticity and Judith Butler’s conception of performativity can be thought of as forms of transformation that are insubordinate vis-à-vis contemporary forms of power. Plasticity in Malabou’s work designates any form’s ability to be transformed and to transform itself. Performativity in Butler’s work names the process through which the self or subject stabilizes itself by repeatedly conforming to or by citing particular social norms, but it can also name the process through which a subject deviates from these constitutive norms. Both Malabou’s and Butler’s notions suggest the possibility of refusal, disobedience, insubordination, against power. To reiterate, this is what we refer to as plastic refusals, refusals made possible by plasticity with the “ability to

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receive form (to be shaped, or changed by external forces), to bestow form (to shape itself), and to annihilate form (to actively overwrite already extant structures)” (ibid, pp. 588–589). The possibility of destroying and undoing the self, in the process of self-reconfigurations, is inherent in plasticity. But what would this transformed subjectivity look like? Here we turn to Stein’s (2021) notion of abolitionist and decolonial futures as tied not merely to a different vision of “being in and with the world” (Stein et al., 2022, p. 62), but as one that implies a radically different form of “being in and with the world” – a form of being that Stein (2021, p. 408) suggests requires deeper reflection from us: [R]ather than seek uncomplicated, immediate, feel-good solutions, we would need to develop the stamina and the intellectual, affective, and relational capacities and dispositions that can enable us to stay with the difficult, painful, messy, nonlinear, life-long work of individual and collective regeneration. Stein’s work on “what to do” in the context of decolonial, abolitionist and refusal-related critiques of the university has been generative and courageous, and is substantively and politically different from the studies on reflexivity and self-reflexivity that have, without shifting the self and institutions, flooded the South African higher education landscape post1994. They are part of a growing genre of innocence-making writing aimed at moderating our moral self-worth through illusions of ourselves as social justice agents within universities, rather than being radically transformative in the real world. The workshops, programmes and scholarly work of Stein and her colleagues and collaborators10 provide troubling, yet productive, analyses and options for praxes. One of her recent papers (What Can Decolonial and Abolitionist Critiques Teach the Field of Higher Education? [Stein, 2021]) not only destabilises the higher education studies field but also cuts through our material and affective attachments to the “university-as-such”, laying bare the necessary work that we are too fearful of, or not prepared to begin, because of the self-transformations that such work would require. Interrogating a set of generally held presuppositions (not truths) we hold about higher education, Stein (2021) asks us to question the following assumptions: higher education is reducible to the modern university; higher education is a story of linear progress; higher education should enable socio-economic mobility; higher education requires the nation state, capital and universal knowledge; and, higher education scholars and practitioners are “good” people. We will, given our focus on self-transformations, reflect on this last assumption in the concluding remarks.

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Conclusion

We suggest that the Africanization of universities is a key non-existent encounter on the South African higher education landscape, not simply because its meanings are contested, but because better locating “Africa and Africans in knowledge” (Ratele, 2019, p. 63) – which is different from adding “African” knowledges in learning and teaching – does not correspond with our present higher education imaginary and our investment in, and privileges attached to, the university-as-such. That is, perhaps our self-interests are not served by thinking and doing the post-Apartheid, postcolonial university. Are we possibly not overly attached and affixed to the university-as-such, which in all likelihood purposefully enjoins the Africanization discussion as a non-encounter? How is the African university, or locating the university in Africa, conjured in our imaginations so that it emerges different from our neo-colonial impulses? The self-transformations required to make these questions land independent of our affective and material investments in the system is a massive task. Stein (2021, p. 399), in responding to this heavy task, acknowledges that the questions, complexities, uncertainties, contradictions, and seeming impossibilities that are raised in [her] analysis may prompt a range of embodied, affective responses, including excitement, defensiveness, shame, anxiety, curiosity, and anger, among others. [She] therefore invite[s] readers to observe and hold space for their own responses in order to self-reflexively consider and contextualize what might be behind those responses. Plastic refusals suggest that we cannot hope for transformations without giving anything up; since what we are “earning” and “gaining” in the system is intrinsically tied to its colonial/modern and, in the South African case, neoApartheid imaginary. We are served by the university-as-such, yet we are blind to our complicity owing to our presumption of “innocence and benevolence [… how we want to] look, feel, and be seen as ‘doing good’” (Stein, 2021, p. 405): good leaders, academics, activists and so on. This forestalls radical self-transformation – plastic refusals – since how we do harm does not readily feature in our self-reflections. And as such, recruiting the concept of refusal (as the act of refusing that which has been refused to you) into a productive critique of the South African university has often been foreclosed by the impossibility of writing ourselves into non-existence. As we are all involved in harmful institutional behaviours, our argument centres around the possibility that “Africanization” may, for various

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reasons, linked to material and emotional investments, not feature in our higher education imaginary. We further propose that plastic refusals, inherently and combined with decolonial and abolitionist critiques of the university, may provide for the transformative movements of the self to unburden its imagination towards Africanization. What we hope to have shown is that radical-transformative potential, not yet activated on the South African higher education landscape, is resident in both institutions as institutions, and the self as a self-forming subject. Plastic refusals present an alternative in which annihilation presents the fertile ground for reformation and reconfiguration of the self as well as the self’s ability to overwrite the structures which have formed it. That plasticity contains the possibilities for emergence, dissolution and self-annihilation in the formation of new modes of subjectivity and being, as precursors to rethinking the university itself, suggests a space for productive engagement with refusing the university, or refusing the university-as-such, without the anxiety of writing our own annihilation. Plastic refusals provide the decolonization and Africanization project with the (un)certainty of plasticity, the knowledge that annihilation may result in “transformation through destruction”, both for the academic subject and for the institutions they inhabit. Beyond this debate, plastic refusals offer broader discourses of refusal as a concept through which the act of refusing can be linked to dialectical formation rather than simply an articulation of negation. Thinking the plasticity of refusal reveals the latency of the act, which in turn highlights the potential of negation to serve radical transformation. Notes 1 Keet, A. 2011. Shared Complicities, Collective Futures. 2 These are categories of classification inherited from Apartheid. 3 See Zembylas (2021), who, with intellectual deftness, also provides a productive synthesis on “refusal writing” in higher education. 4 This refers to the protests prior to, during and after the 2015–2016 student “uprising” in South Africa. The protests mobilized around the demand for free, decolonized higher education. See Keet, Nel and Sattarzadeh, 2021. 5 The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic (2005) 6 The New Wounded (2007/2012) 7 What Should We Do With Our Brain? (2004/2008) 8 Morphing Intelligence (2017/2019) 9 The conventional, neoliberal, corporatist university that reproduces itself. “The university-as-such has never been a bastion of progress, learning, and fairness; it has always excluded individuals and communities on the basis of race, class, gender, sexuality, citizenship and politics” (Undercommoning Collective, 2016, para. 1). 10 See https://higheredotherwise.net

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Malabou, C. (2011). The Heidegger change: On the fantastic in philosophy. SUNY Press. (Original work published 2004). Malabou, C. (2019). Morphing intelligence: from IQ measurement to artificial brains. Translated by C. Shread. Columbia University Press. (Original work published 2017). Mamdani, M. (2019). Decolonising Universities. In T. Halvorsen, K. Orgeret, & R. Krøvel (Eds.), Sharing knowledge transforming societies (pp. 48–67). African Minds. Martel, J. R. (2011). Textual conspiracies: Walter Benjamin, idolatry, and political theory. University of Michigan Press. Mbembe, A. (2017a). Critique of black reason. Translated by L. Dubois. Duke University Press. (Original work published 2013). Mbembe, A. (2017b). Requiem for the Slave. In A. Mbembe (Ed.). Critique of Black Reason (pp. 129–150). Duke University Press. (Original work published 2013). Mbembe, A. (2019). Future Knowledges and Their Implications for the Decolonisation Project. In J. Jansen (Ed.). Decolonisation in Universities: The politics of knowledge (pp. 239–254). WITS University Press. Mbembe, A. (2021). Out of the dark night: Essays on decolonization. Translation by D. Ginsberg. Columbia University Press. (Original work published 2010). Mkhize, M., Mtshali, M., & Sithebe, K. (2022). School-based factors affecting Grade 12 accounting learners’ performance in the General Certificate Secondary Examination (GCSE) in Eswatini. South African Journal of Education, 42(1), 1–12. Ratele, K. (2019). The world looks like this from here: Thoughts on African psychology. Wits University Press. Robinson, C. (2000). Black Marxism: The making of the black radical tradition. 3rd Ed. University of North Carolina Press. SAHRC (South African Human Rights Commission). (2016), Transformation at public universities in South Africa. South African Human Rights Commission. Sinha, M. (2017). Reviving the Black radical tradition. In D. Chasman & J. Cohen (Eds.), Race, capitalism, justice (pp. 66–71). Boston Review. Stein, S. (2021). What can decolonial and abolitionist critiques teach the field of higher education? The Review of Higher Education, 44(3), 387–414. Stein, S., Andreotti, V., Suša, R., Ahenakew, C. & Čajková, T. (2022). From “education for sustainable development” to “education for the end of the world as we know it”. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 54(3), 274–287. Undercommoning Collective. (2016). Undercommoning within, against and beyond the university-as-such. Roar Magazine. [Online]. 4 June. Retrieved from: https://undercommoning.org/undercommoning-within-against-and-beyond/ Zembylas, M. (2021). Refusal as affective and pedagogical practice in higher education decolonization: A modest proposal. Teaching in Higher Education, 26(7–8), 953–968.

PART III

(Po)Ethical Praxis of Refusal

9 REFUSING ARCHIVES OF POSSIBILITY A Decolonial Praxis of Temporalizing Ethics Petra Mikulan

Preamble

For those participating in the settler academic enterprise, determined to sustain it into the future, it is important to recognize the oppressive regimes of temporality that allow for this thought of a future to automatically include “us”. The axiological question of how to keep academia alive and well in the future of unprecedented environmental collapse and accelerated degradation of most human and ahuman life intensifies its unthought mode of address – what is in the question of “human” future past such that it forecloses any thought of alternative, (im)possible pathways and dimensions of its existence? Here, I focus on the latter. I suggest that any interrogation of an ethics (e.g., of refusal) is profoundly temporal, while temporality itself is intensely axiological. There is a real limit in theorizing an ethics of refusal, a harmful impossibility bound up with centuries of educational protagonism (Mikulan and Wallin, 2022), colonial, patriarchal and professionalized (i.e., academic) inscriptions, research funding, narrative control and management of the Archives. For example, my attachment to a particular kind of pedagogy (reading, teaching and writing) in higher education, in the spaces of continuous patriarchal, settler colonial violence is both a symptom of academia insisting on continuously rememorializing itself through monumental inscriptions of the Archive and a refusal of an ethics of dying well with and within academia. In this chapter, I understand ethics as a negotiation of impersonal and attentional modes of being in and imagining the world. An ethics that disengages

DOI: 10.4324/9781003367314-13

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morality from the self-determined subject. In Pragmatic Rights, Colebrook similarly suggests that we reframe rights not as forces due to persons, but as a negotiation of impersonal forces. Negotiating the rights (or claims) among impersonal forces would include speech, institutions, things, bodies, and all sorts of non-humans. (Rather than, say, ask who has the right to own a gun or marry or be granted citizenship, we might focus on what has a right or claim to be sustained: Marriage? Families? Reproductive technology? Guns?). (2015, p. 158) We might ask, do the patriarchal, colonial and neoliberal time regimes, or the Archive of possibilities as we know it, have a right or claim to be sustained? With this shift, significant legal steps could be taken. The ethical force of temporality resides in its imaging of the world’s possibility/capacity as linearly sequential, one that derives its authority from elevated powers of inscription, separability and necessity of the Whole/ Same. Supported by the knowledge devices of archiving (narrating, omitting, selecting, indexing, scaling, measuring, excavating and appropriating), and the scientific master narrative of universality, liberty and property, colonial temporality equals restricted value extracted from divergent, (im) possible paths – those that may have been, but were not taken. Western Archive, supported by academic research, does not establish a sequential temporality to protect a counter-narrative; it creates the counter-narrative (linear progression of humankind from primitive towards rational modes of existence) in order to establish the regime of Mastery over predetermined modes of all possible ontological and epistemological existences (i.e., Archive of possibility). For example, as detailed by, among others, Maracle (2015, p. 57) and Graeber and Wengrow (2021), Indigenous knowledge was both “plundered gratuitously” and the knowledge itself was appropriated by numerous European scholars (e.g., Marx and Rousseau) without citing their source, while Indigenous peoples were deemed to have no science, law or knowledge. In this chapter centred on refusal, I focus on temporalizing ethics for two reasons. As a set of “atemporal” principles, axiology inserts all human action in the framework of objective or phenomenological time that equalizes them all through continual monumentalization of inscription in the authorized Archives of possibilities (of colonial, geoextractive and “scientifically” validated horizons of meaning, sense and desire for a good life). In times of environmental collapse and ongoing slavery, the par excellence ethical question (with its grammar of principles and arrangements) in the

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settler academia of the Global North1 might not be how to become more just and equitable (and in the process, more profitable) in the future of today, as such aims are profoundly violent and teleological in their morally redemptive messianism (either mourning this loss or seeking redemption by deferring its death into some future after injustice, racism and misogyny). Instead, we might ask in what ways does academia’s re-memorialization and self-preservation through continued repetition, professionalization and re-narrativization of the authorized past and future Archives of Possibility (of values, principles and virtues), always already in advance, also require a decolonial praxis of an ethics of refusal, archiving that cannot be controlled, but insists as an excess of (im)possibles2 not sanctioned by linear temporality of the Western Archive of possibility? Following Brazilian feminist philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva’s (2014) poethics of writing, I use citations in bold instead of subheadings to frame the four different responses (sections) to the above question: (1) in reactualizing itself as always already decidedly messianic in its answer to the (innocent) ethical question of what a good life makes important, higher education blocks an ethics of a world otherwise; (2) resistance against the death of settler university is a necro and biopolitical tool that continues to govern the good and the proper vitality of response, and responsibility is shifted once again onto the othered to refine our White sensibilities and sentimentality; (3) in reading the Archive contra-factually by writing critical fabulations as the continuity of discontinuity of the narratives of the enslaved, time can be thought away from the messianic and biocentric power of the Archive, whose pre-emptive modes of bio-control operate directly through the fixed temporality; and (4) (im)possible3 Archive would shift the power away from the subjunctive and the insistence on the proper possibilities of the Archive of meaning and sense for us, and address the force of rupture, suspending the authorized Archive of possibilities for us. Thus, as Asilia Franklin-Phipps, educational research, race and ethnic studies scholar, abridged in her response to this chapter, “What is required is much more than refusal in the ways we can imagine” (personal correspondence). Creating a speculative call-and-response poethics of my preferred citational pedagogy here creates not only a certain passion and intimacy between myself and these authors but also an ethic of reprise, whereby I place my response to the author not to the test of interpretation, the past or the future possibles, but to other readers of this chapter, also dreaming up impossible worlds, densities and dimensions of time. The academic obligation to index, section, review, critique or engage with others’ thoughts is here replaced by the question: “what particular and local reprise is required by my wager?” It asks, following Lee Maracle (2015), an Indigenous Canadian writer and academic of the Stó꞉lō nation: “To what end do

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I wish to re-create this moment? What direction do I wish this memory to travel in the future?” (p. 3). Such questions affirm and presuppose my temporal being out of phase with the others’ propositions, as well as their dreams. I understand this pedagogical approach to writing as against academic mastery, in which the defaced, subject-predicate propositional logic dominates written, linear temporalities. Black feminism scholar Kara Keeling (2007) suggests that what needs to be recognized is the “recurrent violence of colonization and enslavement and the configuration of (neo)colonial temporality authorized by that violence”, because only then will the efforts to decolonize settler academia be relieved of their quest to locate and identify more accurate (somehow less problematic) representations of blacks, whites, and so on, and charged with the daunting task of understanding, articulating, and challenging (in ways that must hold open the possibility of the impossible) the socioeconomic relations and the spatiotemporal configurations made visible by images. (pp. 34–35) As a white settler and post-socialist cis privileged Balkan feminist, I also recognize that my attachment to decolonization, ethics refusal, and temporality in academia is bound up with my positionality, and it “requires that every recognition of the Black and the White entail an acknowledgment of the violence that authorizes such recognition. Each appearance of the Black and the White conserves that violence” (Keeling, 2007, p. 35). So, if this chapter will have achieved anything at all, it is deep complicity in my share of this violence. 1 My response to the call to refuse, to dissent, is not to rush and abandon the tools for thinking and existing that aid in the confrontation of the instances of total (murder) and symbolic (everything else) racial violence – in all its guises – that seem to multiply endlessly in the global present. No, my response is this: let us start to use these tools with caution, aware of their capacity to reproduce racial violence and at the same time let us move on(ward) to assemble tools with which to think and live in the world otherwise. (Ferreira da Silva, 2018, p. 38) In the European imperial and colonial spatial expansion, time became the tool with which the European civilization began to imagine “itself as a time-conscious civilisation in opposition to a time-less Other”, and thus “western Europe staked its claim to universal definition of time, regularity,

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order; hence also to definitions of knowledge, religion, science, etc.” (Nanni 2012, p. 3). For Nanni, there is a “very real sense” in which this “temporal hubris, together with the mathematically abstracted idea of time which distilled into the mechanical clock, created the necessary culture of time for building empires” (p. 3): But whether it was a case of securing regular and disciplined labourers for farms, mines and plantations, legitimating the dispossession and displacement of nomadic populations, or advancing ‘savages’ along the scale of civilisation or securing souls for the kingdom of heaven, all such projects relied on forms of temporal conversion and the establishment of a specific language and consciousness of time. In assuming the authority to determine when other societies could work, rest and play, the emissaries of the clock worked daily, and hourly, in their quest to bring about a sense of world-wide ‘order’, by exporting their ways of structuring the flow to distant lands, and by preaching to their inhabitants new ways of thinking about what time itself is. Such efforts were driven by significant cultural, as well as concrete economic, imperatives. … At the most fundamental level, therefore, time was both a tool and a channel for the incorporation of human subjects within the colonisers’ master narrative; for conscripting human subjects within the matrix of the capitalist economy, and ushering ‘savages’ and superstitious ‘heathens’ into an age of modernity. (Nanni, 2012, p. 4) The core objective of civilizing Indigenous peoples was primarily shaped by a distinct and progressive perception of time, one aligned with industrial and monastic ideals, which intentionally disrupted and supplanted Indigenous temporal traditions. Additionally, this endeavor found its focal sites in places like factories, railroads, mines, plantations, as well as missionary and residential schools. Here, colonial missionaries, educators, administrators, officers, and slaveholders not only employed but also honed and validated their ideological understanding of structured schedules, clocks, and bells. These concepts served as both the guiding principle and tangible manifestation of Western moral values, linked to the act of cataloging, archiving, fostering transparency, and emphasizing visibility, all within the framework of colonial governance. Western University continues to perpetuate this Archive's constant revival, a temporal and material practice characterized by the curation, indexing, tracking, organization, preservation, and management of the fundamental inquiry into the nature of humanity, portraying it as the sole and objective narrative worthy of dissemination. As many scholars of “refusal”, a decolonial theory and

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praxis most prominently developed in North America by Indigenous studies thinkers (Glen Sean Coulthard, 2014; Audra Simpson, 2007, 2014, 2016; Eve Tuck and Wayne K. Yang, 2014), Black feminism thinkers (Tina Campt, 2017; Denise Ferreira da Silva, 2018; Sylvia Wynter; Saidiya Hartman), White feminism thinkers (Bonnie Honig, 2021), fugitivity thinkers (Franz Fanon, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, 2004) and cultural anthropology (Carole McGranahan, 2016) have suggested, the Western University’s programme is conditioned on violence, violence as the ground of both a sense of the human (Cavarero, 2015, p. 11) and a counter-history of the human (Hartman, 2008, p. 3). The founding temporal (progressive) equation of bioaxiological sentimentality upon which the enterprise of higher education builds its continued colonial value is, among so many others, conditioned on the following: (a) dispossession of black and brown bodies (Chatterjee and Maira, 2014; Boggs and Mitchell, 2018; Yanira Rodríguez, 2019; Asilia Franklin Phillps, 2017; Shirley Tate, 2014); (b) messianic work towards redemptive and salvific futures; resulting in (c) disinvesting from temporally “regressive or primitive” values/modes of relating in praxis, such as, for example, sororal kinships or community thinking (Bonnie Honig, 2021; Michael Taussig, 2020; Petra Mikulan and Nathalie Sinclair, 2023); (d) governing the Archive of possibilities, of what are deemed possible and impossible modes of being and becoming; and (e) foreclosing any counternarrative of what it might/will have been to be human otherwise (Saidiya Hartman, 2008; Sylvia Wynter, 2003; Walter Mignolo, 2011). Certainly, our business cannot be immersed in educating the privileged about how to die well, so others can live well? Clearly, “we” do not want to keep repeating the euro-centric, theological humanism of the past. But, as Australian philosopher Claire Colebrook argues: Isn’t there a messianism at play in the critique of the past, in the critique of teleological posture in which there is a fixed point towards which we are to move, because it represents “a hope for a future that is radically other than the present, may emerge from the present but must also gesture infinitely, and absolutely, beyond any of its actualized figures or inherited modes”? (Colebrook, 2016, p. 197). Global North and settler academia’s messianism takes time into its own hands, seeing the revolution as sprouting from the now, inflected by the past, and moving into a (hopefully) open future that offers more than a repetition and redemption of the past. In its messianic/colonial quest of the past, present and future, higher education’s mandate to maintain, guard and reproduce the Archive of necessity, that is, of authorized (and by implication impossible) modes of academic existence, persists intact. What then is the share of violence in higher education’s colonial demand on

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atemporal ethics? In reactualizing itself as always already decidedly messianic in its answer to the ethical question of what a good life makes important? For whom, when and how much? 2 This is a cry, quite simply a cry. Of a realizable Utopia. If the cry is taken up by some or by all, it becomes speech. A common song. The cry and the speech work together to lift up the possibilities, and also what we have always believed to be the impossibilities, of our countries. (Glissant [1997] 2020: 144–145) When Belgian philosopher Isabelle Stengers applies an ethics of “what experience makes important”, as a speculative pragmatic praxis, she proposes that morality, following Alfred N. Whitehead’s philosophy, therefore requires being open to the consequences. Whatever the reasons justifying it may be, no idea is innocent. This does not mean that it is guilty: it is the sense of non-innocence which is the first and the last word of any morality. (Stengers, 2017, p. 17) If, following Stengers’ speculative pragmatism,4 I, as a White settler teacher and researcher, am compelled to abstain from speculative actions in addressing the question of non-innocence and opt to take the risk instead, the most apparent manifestation of this decision would necessitate my disengagement from the settler University. This is because the response cannot commence from the vantage point of a self-assured subject intertwined with an entrenched and comprehensible grammar of the Archive, one deeply connected with the colonial, imperial, and missionary endeavors of White Protestant settlers. To embrace a risky gesture, conversely, would signify an ethical stance that doesn’t initiate or culminate within the confines of the grammar associated with a self-determined settler or settled subjectivity. The process of responding to this call-and-response, through an ethical gesture, remains uncertain and cannot be predetermined; it can only be “resolved” by taking risks in accordance with the specific demands of each unique situation. Therefore, when Stengers advocates for an ethic of unsettling our thought processes, starting with the acknowledgment of feeling “bound” and, more crucially, “presenting oneself as such,”she suggests that this would have to be a “mark of minority thinking in a double sense: in not dreaming of thinking on behalf of others and in not seeking to follow at any price the postulates of one’s own inspiration” (Stengers, 2017, p. 19).

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We can think of this call to unsettlement and enragement with the normative regimes of knowledge and the Archive not as justification, but as an ethical commitment (Critchley, 2007) in teaching, supervising, research, department meetings, etc., which, as Stengers proposes, following feminist science philosopher Donna Haraway, would manifest as a call to “responseability”. An ability to respond would be “the capacity to be accountable for an action or an idea to those for whom the action or idea will have consequences” (Stengers, 2017, p. 15). However, I want to caution against settler academics fostering “response-ability”, if this capacity becomes manifest as that “which allows us to see our own perspective in a new and unfamiliar way, from elsewhere or from the perspectives of those who are very different from us” (Medina, 2016, p. 187), a normative style of our professional academic resistance against the universal,5 us White-settleracademics-as-allies. If there are no intentional pedagogical spaces in academia for dying well (in the ruins of the crimes committed by the Archive, in the name of and for the Archive), a radical refusal of our privileged settler racial positionalities within the university, policy and epistemology by planned pedagogical interventions, resistance becomes a necro and biopolitical tool that continues to govern the correct or expected modes and effects of differently distributed and racialized vitality of a response, and responsibility is shifted once again onto the othered to refine our White sensibilities and sentimentality. For example, in An “Ethics of Resistance”, critical feminist pedagogy scholar Hillevi Lenz Taguchi proposes that we apply deconstructive talk as a praxis and “an ethic of resistance” in order to (a) make visible the conditions and readings (understandings) we believe ourselves to have (what we view as natural and taken-for-granted); (b) incorporate supplementary (different) readings with the help of other theories, thereby making visible the absences and exclusions in our immediate taken-for-granted reading; (c) consciously problematize what we take for granted; (d) resist the understandings that dominate our thinking and are, therefore, most available to us; (e) use difference as a productive force; and (f) make conscious choices for practice driven by our sense of responsibility to our new understandings of ourselves, our work, and the children. (Lenz Taguchi, 2008, p. 280) It would be fair to assume this to be a very precise description of what many of us settler-White-academics-as-allies strive towards and believe a good and proper (ethical) teaching, writing, supervising and research praxis, driven by our White sensibility and “our sense of responsibility”,

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ought to achieve in order to model for each other and our students how to properly (ethically) disrupt/resist the oppressive and normative regimes of knowledge (re)production. It would then be fair to say that upholding such an ethic of resistance would need to be felt as an imperative and an obligation in any academic praxis that wants to keep on going, in this case by way of staying with the trouble. What troubles me most with this style of an ethic of resistance, as important as it is in disrupting the “view from nowhere” by making important the consequences of the actions we take to address the “sense of noninnocence” of morality, is that this style of resistance does not go far enough and risks becoming dogmatic, for it privileges rushing in to maintain the White settler sentimentality of the proper horizons of possibility over and against those which are deemed dissonant or improper. I will briefly address two senses of this tension. First, such an ethic of resistance starts with a self-determined (non-porous, settled, bounded) subject who then and properly abled resists the very system that always already allows for resistance, but only on its own terms – terms of the good and the proper such that the principles of universal equality and universal freedom are not the ultimate grounds for modern existence, but that, in fact, their circulation is contingent upon the deployment of racial difference and cultural difference in order to delineate the proper ethical domain of application of the universal principles under which colonial juridical forms of total violence prevail. (Da Silva, 2019) Such an ethics based on the “proper ethical domain of application” does not allow for “dissonant” and “improperly” “violent” resistance of the undercommons: We cannot say what new structures will replace the ones we live with yet, because once we have torn shit down, we will inevitably see more and see differently and feel a new sense of wanting and being and becoming. What we want after “the break” will be different from what we think we want before the break and both are necessarily different from the desire that issues from being in the break. (Harney and Moten, 2013, p. 6) The progressive and teleological tense of temporality as infinite flow/ growth is here broken by valuing dissonance, the insistence of the possibles in the local now-when “we have torn shit down”. The taking apart in the diachronic yet composite now of Black decolonial thought is an ethic of

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resistance that does not belong nor begin with the archive, because she was never there. As Silva shows, Black Lives Matter, as both a movement and a call to respond to everyday events of racial violence (the killing of unarmed Black persons by police) that rehearse the ethical syntax that works through/as the liberal democratic state, signals a political subject emerging in the scene of obliteration through a sentence without a (self-determined) subject. (2017) Black Lives Matter is an ethic of resistance that operates from without the bonds of a proper subject who gives himself law, rights and response-abilities. As such, this ethic of refusal risks a speculative gesture in a different tense, or as in feminist and Blask Studies scholar Campt’s words, “the tense of possibility that grammarians refer to as the future real conditional or that which will have had to happen now”, as an “imperative rather than subjunctive - as a striving for the future you want to see, right now, in the present” (Campt, 2017, p. 17). It is an ethic of refusal that answers for what experience makes important, not via the subjunctive, nor therefore via the proper. Rather, as an ethics of a local, quantic imperative – an inhuman force operating in the tense of this life ending, such an ethic depends on something that is not reducible to my experience of temporality, but on an inhuman wager that is beyond all predetermined possible experiences insisting in the question of contested futures. 3 If I could have conjured up more than a name in an indictment, if I could have imagined Venus speaking in her own voice, if I could have detailed the small memories banished from the ledger, then it might have been possible for me to represent the friendship that could have blossomed between two frightened and lonely girls. Shipmates. Then Venus could have beheld her dying friend, whispered comfort in her ear, rocked her with promises, soothed her with ‘soon, soon’ and wished for her a good return. Picture them: The relics of two girls, one cradling the other, plundered innocents; a sailor caught sight of them and later said they were friends. Two world-less girls found a country in each other’s arms. Beside the defeat and the terror, there would be this too: the glimpse of beauty, the instant of possibility. (Hartman, 2008, p. 8) Instead of merely repeating the past, temporalizing an ethic as an inhuman wager can, if we follow African-American studies scholar and novelist Saidiya Hartman, be seen as swelling the present and creating futures and altering the past. As suggested elsewhere (Mikulan and Sinclair, 2023), habits and

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rituals that operate through trespassing transtemporal kinship thinking, doing and feeling, mark out different measures – rarely, actually, achieving synchronicity. While, as Hartman suggests, “a slave ship made no allowance for grief and when detected the instruments of torture were employed to eradicate it” (Hartman, 2008), if she has told the above counter-story of the two girls, it would have “trespassed the boundaries of the archive” (Hartman, 2008, p. 9). At the same time, in not telling their counter-story, Hartman asks, “was I simply upholding the rules of the historical guild and the “manufactured certainties” of their killers, and, by doing so, hadn’t I sealed their fate? Hadn’t I too consigned them to oblivion?” (Hartman, 2008, p. 10). For Hartman, fabulating this quantic event via epistemological questioning of the ethics of archive, ethics and politics of telling any story, is what is at stake – not only to “give voice to the slave”, but rather to fabulate impossibles, unimaginables, “what cannot be verified” and archived (Hartman, 2008, p. 12). “It is an impossible writing which attempts to say that which resists being said (since dead girls are unable to speak)” (Hartman, 2008, p. 10; emphasis in original). This critical fabulation (Hartman, 2008, p. 11) of “what cannot be verified” (Hartman, 2008, p. 12) – an “impossible writing” (Hartman, 2008, p. 10) – asks, what it would be to violate historicity, violate the archive? Hartman asks, “[H]ow does one re-write the chronicle of a death foretold and anticipated, as a collective biography of dead subjects, as a counter-history of the human, as the practice of freedom?” (Hartman, 2008, p. 3). Hartman’s act of fabulating the impossible event that potentially transpired between the two slave girls aboard the Recovery, an event that might have remained concealed from the ship’s crew and might have went unreported, presents a novel method of temporal measurement. She introduces the notion of “might have been,” suggesting a new way to gauge time by conceptualizing impossibilities as contra-possibilities. This entails a reinitiation of what could not materialize initially but insists on its simultaneous continuation as a general potentiality. It represents a “bundle of possibilities, mutually consistent or alternative,” emerging from the multiplicity of eternal forms of political aspirations that exist beyond audibility and legibility within the prevailing frameworks of political rationality (Best and Hartman, 2005, p. 9). By engaging in the counterfactual reading of the archive through the composition of critical fabulations that sustain the narrative’s continuity amid discontinuity, Hartman underscores an ethical imperative to respect black noise – the shrieks, the moans, the nonsense, and the opacity, which are always in excess of legibility and of the law and which hint at and embody aspirations that are wildly utopian, derelict to capitalism, and antithetical to its attendant discourse of Man. (Hartman, 2008, p. 12)

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When higher education is no longer imaged as an atemporal, erected figure of phallic, heteronormative copulative familial reproductive rganism sustained into future, time can be thought away from the messianic and biocentric power of settler university, whose pre-emptive modes of bio-control operate directly through the archival activity of fixed past and potential futurity in the present, serving as lures for feelings to existing desires. For instance, in many universities in the Global North, the underlying premise is to enable a privileged few to lead a good life. However, the definition of a good life in this context has been narrowed down to serve the interests of the powerful elite. It has become closely intertwined with mass consumerism, where the production and commodification of ever-new desires fuels an endless and cruel cycle of repetition and deferral. The abrasive and incommensurate temporalities of the no longer and the not yet (Hartman, 2002, p. 770) are the share of violence in education’s continuous reactualization. What is at stake today is the fact that we “have yet to imagine the possibility of writing a history that attends to the possibility of the non-self-identity of any historical moment” (Goldberg, 2007, p. 503). If we consider how the micro and macro events of continuous reenactments of white modernity allow for the racialized, gendered, and heteronormative appropriation of temporal scales within higher education, then the praxis of refusal takes on a profound significance against the (re) production of disenfranchised temporal disparities. Refusal, understood as a disengagement from established norms and a declaration of boundaries, as discussed by Bhungalia (2020), becomes a praxis of radically temporalizing ethics that goes “beyond” simply revealing the constructed nature of “historical barriers” or the fragility of “temporal markers like the past and present,” as noted by Hartman (2002, p. 763). It is an ethical praxis that challenges the proprietary foundations upon which the cultural, economic, and political accumulation of temporal capital within higher education is harnessed and deployed for the maintenance. 4 “Deep Implicancy” as “Radical Immanence” is for me a way of imaging the world without the idea of relations, which always presuppose that things are inherently separate or separable. What if thinking took a step back, found itself as a part of the whole mess of it all that is the plenum and became happy with providing momentary resolutions at each instance according to an intention mediated by the given context? (Da Silva, 2019, p. 10) A decolonial praxis of temporalizing ethics seeks to shift the locus of power away from the subjunctive realm, which often adheres to the predefined

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possibilities within the archive of meaning and sense. Instead, it addresses the force of rupture, emphasizing the emergence of “what experience makes important” as an ethical force that encompasses both possibilities and impossibilities, particularly those that extend beyond our immediate context of temporal attachments (either past, present, or future). So then in the case of answering locally, for what University on unceded territory makes important, is precisely an insistence of (im)possibles, as a future imperative in the local now-when we are called to end this experience of higher education as we know it. Higher education is steeped in an autopoietic pedagogical praxis of “repetition and replication” with a particular grammar of cultural reproduction and interpretation – pedagogies are created and reproduced based on certain regimes of bio and necropolitical power in particular space–time compositions. Autopoiesis, in the words of Canadian gender studies scholar Catherine McKittrick, [i]s the process through which we repeat the conditions of our present mode of existence in order to keep the living-system – our environmental and existential world, our humanness – living. The living-system is normalized and inconspicuous and comfortable (our attachment and allegiance to the system keeps it living). Here, too, the processes of repetition and replication fold into each other demonstrating the correlational workings of how we know our human life and, simultaneously, do not notice the process of recursion: the practice of being human, and the enactment of social life, replicates itself with the analytic, affective, and material talisman of realization inducing the replication of how things already are and therefore normalizing the system as imperceptibly quotidian. (McKittrick, 2021, pp. 133–134) Higher education operates as an autopoietic institution with its foundations deeply rooted in the colonial and imperial grammar of civilizing both human and non-human entities. This spatiotemporal civilizing grammar, born from settler colonialism and deeply embedded in the educational archive, casts a long shadow over all pedagogical endeavors. It relies on a constructed framework of time and space that has been tested, practiced, and refined in colonial contexts through the implementation of church, school, and bureaucratic systems of governance. The autopoietic nature of this institution is sustained by a series of morally and scientifically presumed acts of violence, including the propagation of notions like progress, visibility, knowability, transparency, extraction, assessment, measurement, classification, appropriation, displacement, dispossession, and salvation. Given this history, the question arises:

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Why should we persist in envisioning the future of higher education if we were to prioritize an (im)possible ethical proposal? For instance, what if we consider a scenario where settler universities on unceded territory never came into existence or never became institutionalized in a way that perpetuated oppressive and dehumanizing experiences, simply because settler colonialism never occurred? As Stengers suggests. “Making a situation, past or present, be of importance, means intensifying the sense of possibles it harbours, as expressed by the struggles and claims to another way of making it exist” (Stengers, 2017, p. 17). Accounting for this proposal of “what experience makes matter”, as an insistence of (im)possibles, allows for disengagement of ethics from the atemporally subjunctive (in the form of rights and responsibilities) which would not erase the responsibility and accountability of settler academics teaching in North America towards the subjugated and the oppressed student body. On the contrary, if an ethic of refusal intensifies the force of the question, “whether the ‘ending,’ which is the only reasonable thing one can ask of this racial capitalist world, must happen within or outside something, and whether this something that is retained is new or a part of this world” (Da Silva, 2019), an insistence of (im)possibles would dramatize this spatiotemporal exclusive disjunction (inside/outside) as an inclusive tension between an ethics of resistance that insists on the self-determined right to keep on teaching within (now united in the common fight against all forms of deformation, degradation, dispossession and depletion) and an ethics of resistance that encourages an event of refusal of the already-established and predetermined possibilities tout court. Or in Maurice Blanchot’s words, because [a] rupture has occurred. We have been to this frankness that does not tolerate complicity any longer. When we refuse, we refuse with a movement free from contempt and exaltation, one that is as far as possible anonymous, for the power of refusal is accomplished neither by us nor in our name, but from a very poor beginning that belongs first of all to those who cannot speak. (Blanchot, 1971, as cited in Yusoff, 2018, p. 100) Such an ethics of refusal disengages morality from the self-determined subject and asks, “What would it be for this to be understood in its own improper refusal of terms, from the exhausted standpoint that is not and that is not its own?” (Harney and Moten, 2013, p. 96). Such local, temporalizing ethics of refusal from without would entail a pragmatic speculative obligation of a rupture because “cleaving of past and present reflects a desire to re-know the present through creative approaches to knowledge” so that we can “imagine ways of knowing that

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past, in excess of the fictions of the archive”, and “recognize the many manifestations of that fiction and that excess, that past not yet past, in the present (Sharpe, 2016, p. 13) and what comes to matter in the production and creation of knowledge” (Franklin-Phipps, 2020, pp. 37–38). In order to refuse atemporal ethics of the colonial neoliberal patriarchal University and reclaim tempo rubato, higher education would need to rupture both the frugality of skholē (ascetic, passive, pure and non-productive temporality reserved for White men) and askholia (impure, brutal temporality of production as use) and insist on the destruction of all mandates and policies that codify distinctions between class, race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality when based on differential (re)production of use-full and use-less regimes of colonial time. And by implication, of forms of visibility, transparency and surveillance as bioaxiological modes of temporal governance. So then the question, Can this interplay of the refusal of what has been refused, this undercommon appositionality, be a place from which emerges neither selfconsciousness nor knowledge of the other but an improvisation that proceeds from somewhere on the other side of an unasked question? (Harney and Moten, 2013, p. 96) Reprise

If humans truly had a sensibility of what constitutes history in 1750 they would have studied the history of disease and its relation to sanitation rather than slaughter nearly the entire world of whales for the production of perfume over the course of 200 years because humans smelled. If humans truly had a sensibility of what constitutes history, they may not have slaughtered the buffalo in favour of wheat farms, they may not have substituted white bread for black bread, and they may not have slaughtered some millions of Indigenous people in the Americas. If humans understood which humans were important in a sane way they would not have transported and killed millions of Africans as slaves to produce sugar. If they understood the connection between themselves and the plant world they would not have produced sugar at all, implicated as it is in numerous diseases, not the least of which is violence among adults and among children, and hyperactivity. If humans had an accurate sensibility of our connection to the living world they may have studied the relation between fish consumption and health, and overfishing might not have occurred. But the humans in charge do not have an accurate perception of their place in history. (Maracle, 2015, p. 63)

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If the task of temporalizing ethics would account for “a power of refusal”, a power of affirmation of an inhuman imperative of the impossible ‘archive’ that is “accomplished neither by us nor in our name”, then in answering for transtemporal racial, gendered and environmental violence and subjugation, individual higher educational institutions will have to wager an inclusive disjunction – death and endurance – given their own particular cultural and historical context and community relations. For example, at the university I am affiliated with, one that claims the right to govern what, when and how much can or cannot be resisted on the unceded, traditional, ancestral territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm First Nation, a decolonial praxis of temporalizing ethics would need to trespass the boundaries of its Archive and embrace the tense of future real conditional (Campt) and/or future perfect (Ferreira da Silva). A decolonial praxis of temporalizing ethical frames, codes and charters of (im)possible rights, obligations, freedoms, values and virtues begins from as if the following will have happened already, and proceed from there: a. It will have given way to manifold modes of sharing in the imagining, fabulating and archiving alternative forms of being, becoming and belonging. b. It will have answered for the paths, practices, knowledges and sensibilities not taken; the paths that might have prevented the environmental collapse and subjugation of millions of humans and nonhumans. c. It will have responded to “those who cannot speak”, and to the opacity, refusal, resistance, fugitivity, suffering, despair and “deformation of the psychic life” of human and nonhuman persons alike. An ethical force of (im)possibles signals a trespassing capacity of the Archive to make itself hostage to dis-inscribed absences that persist as haunting traces of “might have been”, “will have been” and “as if” modes of unimagined (im)possibles. In the excess of the authorized Archive, it trespasses linear temporality and persists as disenchanting, defiant, dead, inert, anarchic, monstrous and destructive force that operates beyond the intentionality, vitality, meaning and actuality of the sanctioned world of possibilities for “us”. Addressing this impersonal capacity of the authorized Archive, such time-trespassing ethical praxis of reinscribing and reframing (im)possible rights, freedoms and responsibilities of past, present and future persons (human and non-human) ruptures academic Archive of possibility. Such an ethics disengages morality from its messianic deferral of, for example, justice, truth and reconciliation into some distant future. When the grammar of ethical obligations and responsibilities of academic research, teaching and funding becomes temporalized across historic

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timelines, paying debt for coloniality of past and future consequences of decisions made and not made, will have carried legal weight today. Notes 1 My discussion about academia and University as an institution is situated in the Global North, but there is of course a great variability of this university (depending on historical, sociopolitical context). I use this category not as an essentialist one, but rather as a representative one. 2 “An event or act is said to be possible, meaning that one would not know that it would not come to pass” (Century Dictionary). I understand (im)possibles as forces of potentialities not for “us”. 3 For example, in Nietzsche’s Laughter (2001) Bataille writes: “The possible and the impossible are both in the world […] The possible is organic life and its development in a favorable setting. The impossible is the final death, the necessity of destruction for existence […] For man, the possible is good, the impossible is evil” (p. 18). 4 Certain parts of this chapter are short and reworked excerpts from my article “An Ethics of Refusal: The Insistance of Possibles as a Speculative Pragmatic Challenge to Systemic Racism in Education”, published in Educational Theory (2022). 5 For more on the concept of resistance as an underside of the universal, see Dalton (2018). For more on academic “professional managerial class’s resistance as ‘virtue hoarding’”, see Liu (2021).

References Bataille, G. (2001). The unfinished system of nonknowledge. University of Minnesota Press. Best, S., & Hartman, S. (2005). Fugitive justice. Representations (Berkeley, Calif.), 92(1), 1–15. Bhungalia, L. (2020). Laughing at power: Humor, transgression, and the politics of refusal in Palestine. Environment and Planning. Culture, Politics and Space, 38(3), 387–404. Boggs, A., & Mitchell, N. (2018). Critical university studies and the crisis consensus. Feminist Studies, 44(2), 432. Campt, T. (2017). Listening to images. Duke University Press. Cavarero, A. (2015). Narrative against destruction. New Literary History, 46(1), 1–16. Chatterjee, P., & Maira, S. (2014). Introduction: The Imperial University: Race, War, and the Nation-State. In Piya Chatterjee & Sunaina Maira (Eds.), The imperial university: Academic repression and scholarly dissent. University of Minnesota Press. Colebrook, C. (2015). Pragmatic rights. Law and Critique, 26(2), 155–171. Colebrook, C. (2016). Futures. In B. Clarke & M. Rossini (Eds.), The Cambridge companion to literature and the posthuman (pp. 196–208). Cambridge University Press. Coulthard, G. S. (2014). Red skin, white masks: Rejecting the colonial politics of recognition. University of Minnesota Press.

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Critchley, S. (2007). Infinitely demanding: Ethics of commitment, politics of resistance. Verso. Dalton, D. M. (2018). The ethics of resistance: Tyranny of the absolute (1st ed.). Bloomsbury Academic. Ferreira da Silva, D (2014). Toward a black feminist poethics: The quest(ion) of blackness toward the end of the world. The Black Scholar, 44(2), 81–97. Ferreira da Silva, D. (2017). 1 (life) ÷ 0 (blackness) = ∞ − ∞ or ∞ / ∞: On matter beyond the equation of value. Re-Visiones (Madrid), 7. Ferreira da Silva, D. (2018). Hacking the subject: Black feminism and refusal beyond the limits of critique. philoSOPHIA (Albany, N.Y.), 8(1), 19–41. Ferreira da Silva, D. (2019). An end to ‘this’ world: Denise Ferreira da Silva interviewed by Susanne Leeb and Kerstin Stakemeier. Texte Zur Kunst, 12 April. Franklin-Phipps, A. (2017). Entangled bodies: Black girls becoming-molecular. Cultural Studies, Critical Methodologies, 17(5), 384–391. Franklin-Phipps, A. (2020). The productive uncertainty of feminist transdisciplinarity. In C. A. Taylor, C. Hughes, & J. B. Ulmer (Eds.), Transdisciplinary feminist research: Innovations in theory, method and practice (1st ed.). Routledge. Glissant, É. (2020). Treatise on the whole-world. Liverpool University Press. Goldberg, J. (2007). After thoughts. The South Atlantic Quarterly, 106(3), 501–510. Graeber, D., & Wengrow, D. (2021). The dawn of everything: A new history of humanity (First American ed.). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Harney, S., & Moten, F. (2013). The undercommons: Fugitive planning & black study. Minor Compositions. Hartman, S. (2002). The time of slavery. The South Atlantic Quarterly, 101(4), 757–777. Hartman, S. (2008). Venus in two acts. Small Axe: A Journal of Criticism, 12(2), 1–14. Honig, B., & Harvard University Press Complete eBook-Package 2021. (2021). A feminist theory of refusal. Harvard University Press. https://doi. org/10.4159/9780674259249 Keeling, K. (2007). The witch’s flight. Duke University Press. Lenz Taguchi, H. (2008). An ‘Ethics of resistance’ challenges taken-for-granted ideas in Swedish early childhood education. International Journal of Educational Research, 47(5), 270–282. Liu, C. (2021). Virtue hoarders: The case against the professional managerial class. University of Minnesota Press. Maracle, L. (2015). Memory serves. NeWest Publishers, Limited. McGranahan, C. (2016). Theorizing refusal: An introduction. Cultural Anthropology, 31(3), 319–325. McKittrick, K. (2021). Dear science and other stories. Duke University Press. Medina, J. (2016). On refusing to believe: Insensitivity and self-ignorance. In A. Wagner, & J. M. Ariso (Eds.), Rationality reconsidered. De Gruyter. Mignolo, W., & e-Duke Books Scholarly Collection 2011. (2011). The darker side of western modernity: Global futures, decolonial options. Duke University Press. Mikulan, P. (2022). An ethics of refusal: The insistence of possibles as a speculative pragmatic challenge to systemic racism in education. Educational Theory, 72(4), 529–548.

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Mikulan, P., & Sinclair, N. (2023). Time and education: Rethinking time to counter systemic oppression. Bloomsbury. Mikulan, P., & Wallin, J. J. (2022). Terminal protagonism: Negation and education in the anthropocene. In J. L. Beier & J. Jagodzinski (Eds.), Ahuman pedagogy: Multidisciplinary perspectives for education in the anthropocene. Palgrave Macmillan. Moten, F., & Harney, S. (2004). The university and the undercommons: Seven theses. Social Text, 22(2), 101–115. Nanni, G. (2012). The colonisation of time: Ritual, routine and resistance in the British Empire. Manchester University Press. Rodríguez, Y. (2019). Pedagogies of refusal: What it means to (un)teach a student like me. Radical Teacher (Cambridge), 115(115), 5–12. Sharpe, C. E., & e-Duke Books Scholarly Collection 2016. (2016). In the wake: On blacknessandbeing.DukeUniversityPress.https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822373452 Simpson, A. (2007). On ethnographic refusal: Indigeneity, ‘voice’ and colonial citizenship. Junctures: The Journal for Thematic Dialogue, 9, 67–80. Simpson, A. (2014). Mohawk interruptus: Political life across the borders of settler states. Duke University Press. Simpson, A. (2016). Consent’s revenge. Cultural Anthropology, 31(3), 326–333. Stengers, I. (2017). The insistence of possibles: Towards a speculative pragmatism. Parse Journal, Speculation, 7, 13–19. Tate, S. A. (2014). Racial affective economies, disalienation and ‘race made ordinary’. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 37(13), 2475–2490. Taussig, M. T. (2020). Mastery of non-mastery in the age of meltdown. University of Chicago Press. Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2014). Unbecoming claims: Pedagogies of refusal in qualitative research. Qualitative Inquiry, 20(6), 811–818. Wynter, S. (2003). Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its Overrepresentation—An argument. CR (East Lansing, Mich.), 3(3), 257–337. Yusoff, K. (2018). A billion Black anthropocenes or none. University of Minnesota Press.

10 REFUSING COLONIALITY An Ethical Praxis of Paying Attention to Words in Academic Writing Elizabeth Mackinlay

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As was her3 habit of late, she arrived in her office at precisely 7:30 am and sat down at her desk to begin another day. Today, she was tasked with finalizing a chapter on decolonial, ethical and relational writing praxis as refusal in higher education. She knew she needed to begin by providing some guidance to readers on how to engage with a text which explicitly departed from standard writing conventions in the academy. And yet, part of her wanted to resist this and allow readers agency and autonomy – indeed, freewill – to read as they willed. Perhaps she could say that grounded in a commitment to refuse the established norms of academic writing, this chapter departs radically in its presentation by threading theory-as-story in relationality with one another through an interplay of main text with footnotes. Perhaps she could say that this is a deliberate provocation to readers to delink from the usual way of reading academic writing and invites a careful, intentional and agential engagement with the multiplicities inherent within this text to follow the words that ask us to pay attention around. Perhaps, she said to herself – but first, some serious word play. With coffee in hand, she opened the daily newspaper to complete the crossword before moving onto the classifieds. Before the break of day, she had already begun her logophilic morning routine and filled in words such as WE-STERN, IM-PERIAL, SET-TLER, P-OWE-R, POSSESS-IVE, LOGIC, KNOW-LEDGE, BORDER-LANDS, FEM-IN-IST, ROOTS, REFUSAL, ROOTS, and was quite pleased with her progress. And yet, as she looked down at the words on the page, the strangest feeling of déjà vu peppered4 this most ordinary moment of habitual practice – that while she was writing on repeat, beneath such ordinary repetitions there was something extraordinary going on, something intense and intimate, something crooked and corrupt, something unresolved and about to explode the cotton wool of it all apart. She shivered with horripilation as the downy hair on her arms began to stir. One across, a seven-letter word beginning with A; A-C-A-D-E-M-Y.5 She looked outside her window at the pale sandstone buildings of the academy6 as they spitted and sputtered into some semblance of life. But was it, was this life? Lately, she had felt academic life, particularly her academic writing life,7 slowly but surely evaporating in this big and increasingly dark place she no longer called her own. She turned back to the crossword. Two down, a nine-letter word also beginning with A. The library crackled intermittently like the static of white noise on a wire. She could hear the distant explosive bursts of a leaf blower, firing decaying discursive debris further and further away down the abandoned road called for her attention. A sensible station wagon driven by a silverback brandished a bumper sticker which read, “Status quo,8 the only way to go!”, and patrolled the perimeter. Old Montezuma conifer trees stood resolutely by, planted without permission but now rooted in Indigenous ways of being, doing and knowing that had resonated in country across and through time in resistance to the bricks and mortar forcefully 2

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laid upon them. They held their peace quietly, like wise-old stalks of broccoli watching and waiting as the silverback passed, and she too refused to pay him any mind. A-T-T-E-N-T-I-O-N,9 she picked up her black pen and wrote the letters carefully in the white boxes. Noticing the juncture that had appeared with 11 across, she paused, even though she knew the answer. Something was beginning to tug at the edges of her mind, something had slid into that moment and rippled the skin of the taken-for-granted strategies, structures and strictures of academic writing. She murmured to herself, “What is that something?” as a playful draft softly sidled up and suspended all thought. For the first time in a very long time, she felt wide awake; her skin rippled with a shimmer of sensation10 – and then it was gone. She turned her attention back to the crossword and took a sip of her now-luke11 coffee.12 Eleven across. She picked up her black pen once more and carefully wrote I-N-D-I-G-E-N-O-U-S13 in the blank spaces. And there it was, something beckoning from just around the corner ever so slightly in and out of view. She followed the gesture, trying to keep up. Nine down, nine letters, the letter I for Indigenous criss-crossing the borderlands14 between spaces two and four. She chose to ignore the lamp in her spine trying to illuminate this word and moved on, thereby rendering it invisible. Five down, 11 letters. “Oh!” she gasped, as C-O-L-O-N-I-A-L-I-T-Y stepped out from behind the shadows of white in a red coat with gold buttons; she shuddered and surrendered. Here was the past, her white-settler15-colonial past, lying upon the present16 like dust,17 interminably elusive and irritating. She took her floral cotton handkerchief from her pocket and gently blew her nose, hoping that this one act of rejection would rid her head and heart of coloniality forever. Fourteen across, 13 letters. In caps, she carefully penned the D-E-C-O-L-O-N-I-A-L-I-T-Y. Here it was then, the “story let out of the bag”,18 and she knew in that moment that an ethics of refusal was the place where she needed to begin. Turning to the classifieds, she began to explore alternative possibilities. She promptly rejected the first few advertisements she saw and then ran her index down the page. The CLASSIFIEDS Advertisement These advertisements are to be printed weekly; and any academic establishment who has any goods, wares, vessels, or servants related to knowledge making they wish to be bartered, sold, or let; may have their notice carried at a reasonable rate in proportional accordance with their world ranking whereby those who fall below 50 internationally, will need to pay compensation for their poor performance.

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Servants Wanted A single woman as rank and file academic, well versed in metrics. She has to show she is capable of writing at least two Q1 papers a year (preferably on her own); of receiving teaching appraisals of 4.99/5 each and every semester; of advising HDR candidates above and beyond her workload; of ticking boxes and applying for category one grant money regardless of whether her heart is in it or not; and of serving on departmental committees and to serving them tea, coffee and everything they demand; or she need not apply. Her application will be looked at approvingly if she has a strong track record of working with and in obeyance to her male peers (even when they behave like entitled little f*ckers). Only white, settlercolonial, cis-gendered, hetero, childless, middle class, able-bodied, good Christian women will be considered. Apply to Mr. Western, Commission Agent. WANTED. A respectable, steady, innocent woman, approximately 24 years of age, as academic of all-work. She needs to possess the skills of basic thinking and plain writing, and to be a hard worker willing to say yes to everything devoid of complaint or reward. No women (or anyone who is not a white man well-versed in English) with aspirations of one day becoming a professor or a mother, or hoping to retain any semblance of sanity, self-esteem or self-respect need apply. Majority of work to be done at home before 9 and after 5 seven days a week.

Academy of the Antipodes Notice is hereby given, to those who position themselves in the posts; feminists, new materialists and anti-anthropocenics, critical race theorists, intersectional and decolonial scholars, arts-based researchers, narrativists and storytellers, and “I” ethnographers, that if discovered on any of the epistemological estates of their academic establishment; will have their hearts, minds, and bodies systematically imprisoned and positively proceeded against according to Cartesian, colonial and white possessive logic and law. By order of the Academy of the Antipodes. Professor R. DAWKINS, CHAIR WHEREAS my co-worker Elizabeth, deprived of any warning, has eloped from my Department, my dogma and her diligence to me. Her writing and her thinking are to be considered at large. All persons are therefore pressed not to engage in any conversation with her, place any confidence in her, or enter into cooperation with her, as I am determined not to allow her access to any academic establishment lest she retract her notions, notes, and refrain

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from her disobedient dalliances. All persons are forewarned, at their peril, of cherishing, collaborating with or concealing her. P. T. ARCHY.

Advertisements PROFESSOR Liz Mackinlay is pulling away from her academic establishment in a creative-critical craft, with radical thinkers and writers locked and loaded, in search of the roots of life. Any academic wonderers and wanderers who seek the same decolonial heartlines shall be kindly entertained. Apply to www.in-sister.com.

Notes 1 I began writing this chapter while reading Lucy Ellmann’s (2021) collection of essays, Things are against us. Annoyed with the way the world is working, or not working, particularly for all those who are other than white-neoliberalcapitalist men, Ellmann rallies against bras, Trump and electricity and even proposes a sex strike to stop the forces of gender, race and class domination in its tracks. The essay “Three strikes” is thought provoking and visually provocative – it is formatted so that the most of insightful discussion appears in footnotes, as a “minor text”. Her presentation of the text in this way reminded me of David Bright’s poststructuralist intervention into academic writing using the same strategy, because footnotes allowed him to “run off at tangents that seem less important because they are small” (2015, p. 2). Riffing of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “minor literature”, Bright playfully turns major language upside and down, putting it to work down below in the footnotes. This reminds me of Cixous’ (1993a) insistence in Three steps on the ladder of writing in the “School of the Dead” that it is there, down below, where the work of unearthing, unerasing and secreting the secrets that terrify you must be done. So here we are, at the bottom of the page, doing this excavation work. 2 This chapter has already failed; you might even call it the “Great failure”, as Natalie Goldberg does, because the truth is “downfall brings us to the ground, facing the nitty-gritty, things as they are with no glitter” (2004, p. 1). I have crashed right down to the bottom with the stains and stench of coloniality running through my veins from the past into these hands writing in the present. I look down the raw throat of this white-settler-colonial-cisgendered-female throat claiming in this to refuse coloniality in academic writing as an ethical imperative. It begins as a rueful smile playing about my mouth and then becomes loud and raucous, roughly tearing apart the framework that has held me together in the academy for over 25 years. Can’t you see? I laugh at myself. There is no way out of coloniality because the language I am using to write this chapter is English; English – the academic “lingua franca”, the linguistic and discursive metropole of scholarly writing which paralyses the voices and texts from those outside the Global North who do not speak its tongue (Trahar et al., 2019, p. 149) and continues on its unquestioned hegemonic imperialist way (Kumalo, 2018, p. 13). The coloniality of academic writing speaks in English in

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one direction, is positioned in one location, insists that the performance of one particular (un)kind of language has power and sustains possessive logic over what comes to matter as/in/through words. I was taught to think in this language, to speak in this language, I write in this language, and from birth I have been contained, controlled and captured by this language and, in turn, have done the selfsame to others. Cixous (1976, p. 888) whispers softly as she takes her axe and smashes the chains; it is time to dislocate from this language of coloniality from within – jumble the order, break it all up, empty structures and then fly the coop; “from now on, if we say so, who can say no to us?” (p. 878). 3 Her, a noun that refers to one who identifies as female and at the same time an adjective with an inherently possessive logic. I write this chapter as “her”, a white-settler-colonial-cisgendered-woman-mother, born on the stolen lands of Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nations in the state of Australia named by the invaders Victoria. I write this chapter as “her”, living and working on the stolen lands of Jagera and Turrubal peoples in the southwest suburb of Indooroopilly in inner city Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. I write this chapter as “her”, an educator-ethnographer grown up as a researcher by Yanyuwa, Garrwa, Mara and Kudanji peoples in the southwest Gulf of Carpentaria in the Northern Territory. I write this chapter as “her”, a mother to her Yanyuwa sons and family to many. I write this chapter as “her”, sitting with the gifts of kinship alongside my complicitly with colonialism, searching for ways to do other than in the only way I know how – by writing to it. 4 In this moment, I am thinking and writing with the words of ethnographer and affect theorist Kathleen Stewart, especially her ways of thinking about wording the world with an elsewhere kind if ethical sense-and-response-ability she shares in Ordinary affects (2007). 5 The academy is at the centre of the writing in this chapter. It is the site where this thinking and wondering is produced and performed and where it proliferates. The word itself pushes, pulls and pummels our scholarly work in particular ways to suit and serve its purposes. Yet, until now, I have not paused to pay attention to the roots of this word where our work is so firmly rooted – have you? An etymological search tells me that “academy” or académie from the French, in Italian accademia, academia in New Latin, and in Greek akadēmeia, has been with us since the 15th century and has its roots in academus, the lush olive grove planted by Cimon where Plato taught philosophy to his students (Penfield, 1961, p. 173). The roots of this story are already beginning to circle into a tangled nest where the words written about this ancient word seem to be spoken by and only in relation to men, stuttering, straining and swelling whenever the presence of an Other ventures close by. If you have ever tried to loosen and untie this haven of patriarchal writing about who was who, who did what, when and why in Ancient Greece, you will soon be stung by the tail of tales replete with misogyny – his-tories, which Mercer (2018, p. 183) laments, systematically, strategically and sinisterly erase the significance of power wielding women. Did you notice that in my introductory sentence there is no mention of Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, to whom the sacred olive grove named after Academus and claimed by Plato as his garden, originates from? This omission was a deliberate discursive move to draw your attention to the “foundations on which centuries of sexism and its accompanying misogyny were built” (Mercer, 2018, p. 184). Stay with me as I braid together the shreds of narrative threads related to the roots of the academy. The site itself is a memorial to the ancient Attican hero Akadēmos located in the Kolonus neighbourhood of Athens. As the story goes, when Spartan twin half-brothers Castor and Pollux

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invaded Attica to liberate their sister Helen (later, she would become known as the beautiful Helen of Troy), Akadēmos revealed to them the place of her concealment. Any time thereafter the Ancient Spartans invaded Attica, they expressed their gratitude by sparing the land belonging to Akadēmos. Some say that Plato bought a house next to the garden, others say Plato acquired it through academic endowment, and either way it soon became known as an intellectual centre of light, learning and liberated thought. What is often not said, however, is the significance of the site to Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom. Before Plato, the olive trees planted by Academus were intimately connected to her. After defeating Poseidon in a contest to settle an argument between them over who controlled the city, Athena is said to have planted an olive tree in the heart of the Acropolis as declaration of her dominance and dominion. Seeds from Athena’s sacred olive tree were spread all over Attica, and the roots of each and every olive tree planted then and now in Greece are said to have a trace of her essence flowing through them. So precious was this goddess’s nectar that oil from Athena’s olive trees was given in an amphora as a prize to the winners of athletic contests held in association with the annual Panathenaic festival, held in honour of her. With my hands now knee deep and knotted in the etymological roots of the academy, I am bound to venture further and father [sic, farther] down. There at the bottom I learn that while Plato is remembered for the ways he claimed and proclaimed Academus as an institute for the pursuit of philosophical and scientific teaching, learning and knowledge making, there is a certain kind of amnesic avoidance of the views he espoused in relation to women – namely that there is a very “marked difference between the nature of woman and the nature of man” (Plato, p. 158) and that it was impossible to deny that “one sex is vastly superior to the other” (p. 161). Mercer surmises then that Plato’s hierarchy of difference fostered a practice whereby female bodies were debased as “imperfect compared to male bodies”, from which followed the view that women, by extension, are “morally inferior to men” (2018, p. 185). From there, justification amongst male philosophers for the degradation of women’s bodies abounds – because she has menses and a womb; because her body is soft, weak and prone to tears; because she is cold and passive; because she has procreative powers that must be controlled and regulated if they are going to be put towards collective good. I sigh, “unsettled” and “crushed” alongside Mercer by how readily the world today is willing to “embrace the residue of these ideas” (2018, p. 204) and how deeply grounded the academy is in them. And I have not even yet begun a discussion of the roots of racism in Ancient Greece. 6 There is much focus in Footnote 2 on the origins of the word “academy”, and here I want to draw your attention to those who have dedicated their heart and souls in words and writing to deconstructing, disrupting and demolishing – with full and clear intent – coloniality in and of the academy. Many are from below the imperial metropole of knowledge production and locate themselves in the Global South, reminding us that any moves towards decoloniality cannot be delinked from the racialized geopolitics of the past in the present. In no particular order, here are some of the decolonial scholars that I have been thinkingas-writing with for some time: Jackie Huggins (1998), thank you for reminding me that “White women are colonisers too”; Martin Nakata (2007), your work on the “corpus”, Indigenous standpoint theory and the concept of the “cultural” interface stay with me as important conceptual tools for engaging in thinking and writing about decoloniality; Marie Battiste, I first encountered your work (1998, 2000, 2002) on decolonization in Aboriginal studies and

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higher education while trying to puzzle out my role and place as a non-Indigenous academic in this space – I still don’t have all of the pieces yet, which I think was perhaps your most important provocation; Nelson Maldonado-Torres, thank you for explaining so clearly, so concisely and with such care and compassion the ways in which the coloniality of being “rests on long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism”, and remains a “radicalisation and naturalisation of the non-ethics of war” (2007, p. 248); Walter Mignolo (2011), thanks for shining a light in the dark on the ways in which we are enmeshed with the colonial matrix and providing the “decolonial option” as a way to become epistemically disobedient in order to delink from coloniality; and Ramón Grosfoguel, thank you for exposing the four great epistemicides – I cannot and will not think of bodies of knowledge in the same way and commit myself to the material embodiment of mine in words and writing. I am indebted: to Maria Lugones (2010) for her radical feminist interventions into this space – thank you for the ways you combined thinking and wondering about gender with the race and the legacy of colonialism; to Eve Tuck and Wayne K. Yang (2012) – there are not words for the words you wrote which drew attention to the ways in which lip service is paid to a word which needs, wants and must become something so much more if it is to do any of the work those who speak it proclaim – thank you for rejecting decolonization as metaphor; to Robin Wall-Kimmerer, I do not think you spent a lot of time focusing on the word “decolonial”, but like the strawberries you pay homage to as the heart of your Native American way of being, doing and knowing, your words, about being relationality with as the only and most urgent gesture we can make in writing, are a gift I hope to reciprocate. 7 Writing life suggests Kathleen Stewart (2018), happens “under the velocities of worldly pressure”. It happens when the “matters of life become the matters of words”, because, well, both are in the “middle of something” and as writers the best we can do is to “try and keep up with what’s already happening” (p. 133). It’s like “feeling out the pitch of a note made by an imaginary tuning fork” (p. 133) she offers, and despite my music background, I could no longer here the music, the words, the thing itself. 8 To uphold the status quo – this is what we were trained to do as academic writers – to learn the rules, to accept the rules, follow the rules and uphold existing disciplinary states of affairs. Introduction. Literature review. Theory. Method. Findings. Discussion. References. Are you bored yet? Adherence to these conventions validates the knowledge we produce and possess, but what if, as Laurel Richardson (2000, p. 7) argues, the production of “unexamined fact-oriented, plain prose-style, linear narrative expectation[s] limit what can be known and what can be told”? What if we start peeling away the walls of these papers? What kind of ethico-onto-epistemological structures will we find behind this façade censoring our words and our worlds? I think you and I both know exactly what we will find, and I am not sure about you, but I feel the weight of these limitations each and every time I write – they strangulate as they triangulate, they tyrannize as they theorize, they collude as they conclude, and leave me frozen in the dark. Nunga academic Irene Watson agrees, constantly under pressure to assimilate to the dominance and power of the academy to write in this way, not that. She decides to resist the “muldarbi” (demon spirit, aka white colonial invaders, rapists, murderers), “killer of laws, land and people” (p. 29) by refusing the academic narrative. “What language shall I use?” Watson asks. “One that is mine”, she replies, “a song that breaks and forms and says what is, in the way it is felt” (1998, p. 28). Now my mind, body and soul are

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twitching, urging me to play there in the dark with both creativity and criticality as contrary to the coloniality that keeps all of us, colonizers and colonized, captured there. Can we keep pretending that we don’t know the academic writing status quo is very much in relation with, as bell hooks (2013, p. 191) famously asserted, “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy”? I can’t, and I am ready to suspend caution and edge out beyond what is familiar (after Greene, 2000, p. 139) 9 She is not well known, the “other” Simone – Simone Weil, that is. She was a French socialist feminist philosophical and existentialist contemporary of Simone de Beauvoir’s, but arguably died too young following a radical and revolutionary life of extraordinary danger, despair and discernment. She was extreme, she was smart, she was grassroots, she sat on the threshold and crossed social, political and cultural, in her endeavour to make sense of a world where war, terrorism, poverty, oppression, technology and pollution threatened all forms of life. Amidst such immense suffering, Weil felt deeply the need for roots and sensed that “rootedness” was the “philosophical, ethical and spiritual grounding that situate[d] human life” (1952b/2002, p. 41) and living a “rooted” life of action towards good in the world was for Weil an ethico-onto-epistemological imperative. She wrote extensively how an ethical and non-violent life might be lived and insister-ed that the first step was to pay “attention”. Attention, for Weil, consisted of following the movements of the mind by “suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty” (1951/2010, p. 35) and constituted a kind and slow process of “unselfing”. Paying “attention” involved “waiting, not seeking anything, ready to receive” (1951/2010, p. 35), Weil said, and such open humility of thought outwards beyond the self offered an “antidote to modern dehumanisation” (Stone-Mediatore, 2013, p. 83) and thereby a radically other kind of relationship to others. In much of her work – Gravity and grace, The need for roots – Simone Weil paid attention to the social systems of her time which provided machines whose only purpose was to “crush humanity” – knowledge production and academic writing she considered to constitute such beasts. She lamented the epistemic norms of scholarly words which seemed to stray further and further away from any human meaning – these words, she said, take control and dominate with the sole purpose of converting thought into capital T truths (Weil, in Rozelle-Stone & Stone, 2017, p. 5). She condemned words which sought only to uphold the status quo of “ordinary” institutions by means of abstraction, sidestepping and concealment, thereby “stupefying the mind” and “making us forget the value of human life” (1977, p. 284). Writing for Simone Weil (1952a/1963, pp. 10–11) was an embodied, material, affective and ethical act. Writers, she felt, did not have to be “professors of morals” but they did have to “express the human condition” (1977, p. 289), that is, to engage in the terrible response-ability of “truth telling” (1952b/2002, p. 148). She said that “truth, justice and beauty were sisters and comrades” and “with such beautiful words, we have no need to look for any others” (1977, p. 334). By paying attention to roots and to the roots of words, we might just be able to “introduce a little play into the cogs of the machine that is grinding us down” by grasping and clinging on tight to “every opportunity of awakening a little thought” (1977, p. 40) that renders a different wording of the world possible. Simone Weil, you have my attention. 10 She was older than Simone Weil when she passed, but she died too young. Her final manuscript, Shimmer: Flying fox exuberance in worlds of peril (2022), was published posthumously; in 2004 she wrote Reports from the wild country: Ethics for decolonisation, and before that, Dingo makes us human. I have

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read them all; her words touched an ethical response-and-sense ability of “being in relationality with” as a way of working beyond coloniality as non-Indigenous Australians, which is rare to find. Australian anthropologist Deborah Bird-Rose raised her voice against all manner of colonial violence, insisting that decolonial ethics came to life through the actual conditions of life and that “ethical writing requires openness both to the peril and joy of others” (2022, p. 11). The relations of self and other were intimately linked for Bird-Rose, to being able to attend, to pay attention and to be attentive bearing witness to the colonial difference – in this encounter, she wrote, “every bit of courage, empathy and compassion is called upon” (2022, p. 3). Bird-Rose drew upon the Yolngu aesthetic of “shimmer”, a powerful space where the flow of life is made transparent, where ancestral power of the past presents itself as a gift here and now. If we are open to the other through shimmering moments, every move we make begins to pulsate with the rhythms of that connection and the only possible response is an ethical one – including that which we make in writing. What might shimmer come to be in academic writing? she asked. I don’t think I have an answer yet. 11 The automatic spelling and grammar checker on my computer tries to tell me that “luke” is spelt and used incorrectly; I should be using “lukewarm” instead. Once you start following words around, you start following words around, up and right down to their roots – as Sara Ahmed advocates, it’s a method which traces words “in and out of their intellectual histories” (2019, p. 3) and seeks for understanding of how they are put to use. “Lukewarm” combines “luke” and “warm”, where “luke” is derived from the 12th-century Middle English, 12th word “leuk” meaning tepid and Old English word “lew” which meant warm. If we take words, as Virginia Woolf does, to be sovereign and sentient beings which would prefer that their users think and feel for a moment before apprehending them into meaning, the singular word “luke” has autonomy and agency to denote the sensation it ascribes. The singular luke is described by lexicographers today as obsolete – forgotten, tarnished, no longer useful. Who decided it could no longer stand on its own and needed another to remain meaningful? How many other words have been decreed as such, by whom and to what ends? Following this word around reminds me that words hold meaning in and across time – they are shape-shifters as much as they are sensemakers, and going where they go, affording words their sovereignty, is but one strategic ethical move we can make as academic writers to liberate them from the containers that control them. 12 That ripple of sensation, I read back over this paragraph and recognize it – it is the same feeling that whispers on the edges of a conversation, a thought, a moment when the question is asked “Got ethics?” Everyone pretends that they can’t hear it, that it isn’t speaking loud enough or in the right tongue, and we proceed in an eloquent display of box ticking around any semblance of an answer; but it continues to voice itself and show its face, quietly and patiently demanding that we pay attention. When this question is asked of writing as an ethical and decolonial praxis of refusal, I can’t help but think and wonder that this is intimately linked to language. I turn to Cixous, as I often do, to return to the question. She asks us to remember, “It is we, with our language, who make the law. Who draw the borders and produce the exclusion. Who grant admittance. Who are the custom officers of communication: we admit or we reject” (in Cixous & Calle-Gruber, 1997, pp. 51–52). She asks us to take responseability for the language we use knowing that words have the potential to perpetuate onto-epistemological violence in response to difference and thereby

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reify those hierarchies which live and breathe on capture, cruelty, and cauterization. To write in a language which refuses and interrogates the “settled grounds” of coloniality through “heartline writing” – writing which speaks with to, of, between, with and for the heart; writing which speaks with affect to, of, between, with and for the body; writing which speaks to, of, between, with and for kindliness and candor; writing which is capable of feeling its way to, of, between, with and for difference – this is writing which words and worlds a decolonial ethics of refusal in all its beautiful personal-is-political-is-philosophical-is-poetical relational complexity. 13 I do not know where to begin “unpacking” this word. In Australia, the word “Indigenous” is today used as a “blanket” term to include both Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Often the term used is “Indigenous Australian”, which, for academics such as Marcia Langton and Megan Davis, asserts their identity as both Indigenous and Australian. The terms “First peoples” and “First Nations peoples” are also used increasingly. I remember reading many years ago work by Indigenous Australian academic Marcia Langton (1993, p. 34) in relation to the ways that she and the identities of her people were contained by definitions made by “both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people” to which her countryman Mick Dodson adds, such constructions have and continue to serve the “purpose of reflecting back to the colonising culture what it wanted or needed to see in itself” (2003, n. p.). Discourses of Indigenous selfdetermination as a human right gathered strength in Australia from the 1970s onwards, particularly the UN declaration on the rights of Indigenous peoples to reject all forms of imposed definition. Now, the protocols of naming Indigenous Australians and Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander peoples is to do so in acknowledgement of and in accordance with their own languages and voices – my two sons are Yanyuwa. I write this chapter sitting on the unceded lands of Jagera, Yagera and Turrbal peoples in Brisbane, and I was born on Watharung country in Western Victoria. To name and know the people on whose country I live and love is a gesture to turn the past over in the present – to do otherwise than coloniality which would prefer invisibility and erasure. 14 Gloria Anzaldua, a new mestiza of, through, with and for the borderlands, speaking her Chicana/Latina experience of living in America as a colonized person (in Hernandez, 1995/1996, p. 201). “Borders”, she says, “are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary” (1987, p. 25). In relation to writing, Anzaldua in-sistered that the academy was contained within such “borders and walls that are supposed to keep the undesirable ideas out” (1987, p. 101). It shames her, she says, that people have to begin and stay inside these borders with the “head stuff”; the “rationalising and objectifying…disembodied words and ideas” (in Hernandez, 1995/1996, p. 207), for such “rigidity means death” (1987, p. 101). We are not obliged to the oppression of white patriarchy “who whet their howl on our grief”, she says. Better to step into the borderlands, Anzaldua says, that forbidden space in-between where the prohibited live (1987, p. 101) and where writing has a “mind of its own” – “a rebellious, willful entity, a precocious girl-child forced to grow up too quickly, rough, unyielding, with pieces of feather sticking out here and there” (1987, p. 88). Through a process of “organic writing” (1981, p. 173), Anzaldua says, it is possible to “throw away abstraction and academic learning, the rules, the map and the compass”. Embrace the freedom to “shift the causal meaning” and “disrupt the text” by “theorizing from the feeling”,

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she urges (in Hernandez, 1995/1996, p. 207) – and this is me, trying to do just that. Trying, as Anzaldua presses, to “put history through a sieve”, “[look] at the [colonial] forces, that we as a race, as women, have been part of” (1987, p. 83) and commit to do otherwise in each and every word I write. 15 White and settler – this is “who are I?” (Cixous, 1993b, p. 92), and my story of white-settler possession in Australia begins with Elizabeth Millar. It is circa 1750. She stands tall and proud on the bare and barren cliffs of John o’ Groats in the far north of Scotland, the lands of the Mackinlay clan and her people. She holds a scrap of navy blue and green tartan in her hands and looks across the waters to the Isle of Skye. She grieves for what has come to pass and that which she fears is yet to come. She, her mother and her grandmother, skin to the bone, struggling to make ends meet under English rule. Their crofting house burnt to the ground to make way for the invaders and their sheep. She bows her head and the lilting tones of Mairi Mhor carry her away to Edinburgh. It is now 1852, a drach day in Edinburgh, grey and solemn when Elizabeth Millar’s great granddaughter Margaret passes from this world to the next. There are no mourners to mark her burial. Carried to a pauper’s grave on the back of a cart with other women like her. She will leave this earth alone. Her boys George, Robert and James had left long ago to find a better life in a brave new world they called Australia. After Margaret’s husband died, she just couldn’t keep the house or herself going on her own. She found refuge as a widower in a home for destitute women. She was tired of living cold, poor and outcast as a Highlander in the south. The lilting tones of Mairi Mhor carry her away. It is 1976. Elizabeth Mackinlay sits down at the feet of her grandmother, trying to avoid sheep poo, and watches the band of Scotties march onto the paddock at Linton, Temora, New South Wales. Margaret’s son George arrived here in 1836, “selected” this land and thereby, with the full authority of white patriarchal sovereignty, took possession. The sweet and sorrowful sound of bagpipes echo across the clearing and embraces her in familiar warmth. This is her first time at the Mackinlay clan gathering on the lands of her ancestral home. Soon they will announce the new clan chief – she sighs, they’ll surely name Peter because he is the eldest son of the eldest son. As the second daughter in a family of girls, it will never be her or her sisters. Then they will celebrate with a Highland feast of haggis and tatties with clootie pudding washed down with a few wee drams – but not too much mind, in keeping with the Mackinlay clan motto. After an afternoon of three-legged and egg-and-spoon races, at sunset they are going to plant a tree on the Riverina property and put a plaque with their name on it. It’s going to read, “1836–1976. This land was settled by and belongs to Clan Mackinlay and the descendants of George Mackinlay and Martha Barr”. In the distance, she hears the lilting tones of a woman keening on and for country, but it is not Mairi Mohr. 16 These words draw inspiration from another white-(but not settler)-colonialwoman with and to whom I often feel great affinity and affection – indeed, Virginia Woolf’s words changed my own as a feminist academic irrevocably (add refs). I found Virginia’s A room of one’s own (Woolf, 1929), at a time when the day in, day out deadbeat of traditional academic writing, which I now saw positioned clearly and calculatingly in the heart of patriarchy, threatened to stop mine from beating. With a copy of this work by my side, I threw my inkpot at the “angel in the house” (Woolf, 1980), picked up my pen and began to write life close-up from a low angle to catch but a glimpse of the “the heart of the world uncovered” (Woolf, 1980, p. 53), if only for a moment of being. I have been in love with words for as long as I can remember, and I fell in love

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with the words Virginia wrote, especially the words she wrote about words. Containing and constraining words to one definition was cruel, much like pinning their wings in a butterfly box (2008, p. 90), Virginia said. Words, she said, care not for ceremony or convention but like to go a-roving, meeting, marrying and making meaning in relation for they belong to one another (2008, p. 88). Users of words, Virginia said, needed to pause for a moment in the “dark veil of unconsciousness” (2008, p. 90) to apprehend meaning by thinking and feeling before putting them to use. After all, she said, “There’s no trifling with words, not when they are stand to forever” (1954, p. 188), and immediately reminds of an ethical sense and-response-ability associated with wording the world. I have read and reread A room of one’s own many, many times; I can almost cite the words in this text by Virginia by heart, so deeply are they buried there. There is one phrase however, that always causes me to falter: “It is one of the great advantages of being a woman,” writes Woolf, “that one can pass even a very fine negress without wishing to make an Englishwoman of her” (Woolf, 1929, p. 42). Woolf gazes upon a passive racialized female other, deems her an object who can be judged as not English and not woman, and thereby excluded. Even now as I type it, the feminist flames lit by Virginia’s incitement to “set fire to the old hypocrisies” and burn the buildings of educated men with “rags, matches and petrol” (Woolf, 1938, pp. 65–66), begin to smoke, smothered as they are by the white race power and privilege this sentence reveals. Words hold things; they hold things in particular powerful relationships to one another; the words in this carrier bag, as Ursula K. Le Guin (1989, p. 169) might say, are especially heavy. Jane Marcus (2004, p. 24) shakes her head, no matter which way we turn this combination of letters and words around, “we cannot relieve it from the burden of racism”. Virginia Woolf, no matter how much her work might be positioned as anti-imperialist critique (see, for example, Three guineas and “Thoughts on peace in an air raid”) or how comfortably she used “her great grandfather’s antislavery arguments and metaphors to articulate feminist claims for freedom and citizenship”, she did so “without relating racial subjectivity to gender” (Marcus, 2004, p. 29). Virginia Woolf tried, she tried very hard, to free herself from the language and institutions of patriarchy, yet she remained caught in coloniality and white possessive logics. If I apply Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s thinking – an Indigenous feminist Goenpul academic of the Quandamooka Nation of Minjerribah in Queensland – to Virginia’s 28-word statement, I can see clearly how whiteness is operating “possessively to define and construct itself as the pinnacle of its own racial hierarchy” (2015, p. xx) and in servitude to “white first world patriarchal nation-states” (2015, p. xxiv). We can cry in her defence, “But Virginia was of a different time when people!” and yet – yet, in this instance, your words did fail you Virginia, or perhaps you failed them because you did not pause to think and feel before you put them to use. You did not apprehend the racialized meaning in your use of the word “negress”, the word was at your command, and you demanded it undertake particular (un)kind of work to at once show your sympathy with anot-her as a woman while shunning her as a-not-her. In this time, are my words any different? Are yours? Is it even possible to write beyond coloniality from within without. 17 I use the word “dust” here deliberately to take full advantage of its contranymic characteristic. A “contranym” is a word that is its own opposite, a word that has two meanings which contradict one another. A contronym asks us to think and write at the in-between of opposites and the contronym and dust caught my attention: dust, to add fine particles or to remove them.

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Dust is a particle, a part and yet apart, conflicted partway. Coloniality is the velvety veneer which gathers velocity in the volumes of words written in ode and obeyance to it. Dirty white, it is heavy enough to see and yet light enough to be carried away by the cleansing sweep of the present over the past, energetically lifted into the air to sparkle and shine with renewed brilliance. Old ways of speaking, thinking, knowing and writing are reconstituted and reclaimed as it descends and lodges itself in every nook and corner of the academy; ashes to ashes, dust to dust, it smothers as it smooths the dying pillow. 18 Once more here I am thinking and writing with Kathleen Stewart (2007, p. 23).

References Ahmed, S. (2019). What's the use?: On the uses of use. Duke University Press. Anzaldua, G. (1981). “Speaking in tongues: A letter to third world women writers”. In C. Moraga & G. Anzaldúa (Eds.), This bridge called my back: Writings of radical women of color. Kitchen Table Press. Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderlands/La Frontera: The new mestiza. Aunt Lute Books. Battiste, M. (1998). Enabling the autumn seed: Toward a decolonized approach to Aboriginal knowledge, language, and education. Canadian Journal of Native Education, 22, 16–27. Battiste, M. (Ed.). (2000). Reclaiming Indigenous voice and vision. University of British Columbia Press. Battiste, M., Bell, L., & Findlay, L. M. (2002). Decolonizing education in Canadian universities: An interdisciplinary, international, indigenous research project. Canadian Journal of Native Education, 26(2), 82–95, 201, 201, 201. https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/decolonizing-education-canadianuniversities/docview/230305394/se-2 Bright, D. (2015). Becoming-teacher: A partial and experimental account of Western native English-speaking teachers in Vietnamese international schools. The University of Queensland, School of Education. https://doi.org/10.14264/ uql.2015.840 Cixous, H. (1976). The laugh of the Medusa. Signs, 1(4), 875–893. Cixous, H. (1993a). Three steps on the ladder of writing. Columbia University Press. Cixous, H. (1993b). Without end no state of drawingness no, rather: The executioner’s taking off. New Literary History, 24(1), 91–103. Cixous, H., & Calle-Gruber, M. (1997). Rootprints: Memory and life writing (E. Prenowitz, Trans.). Routledge. Dodson, M. (2003). The end in the beginning: Re(de)finding aboriginality. In A. Moreton-Robinson, I. Anderson, I. M. Langton, & M. Grossman (Eds.), Blacklines: Contemporary critical writing by Indigenous Australians (n. p.). Melbourne University Press. Ellmann, L. (2021). Things are against us. The Text Publishing Company. Goldberg, N. (2004). The great failure: A bartender, a monk and my unlikely path to truth. Harper San Francisco. Greene, M. (2000). Releasing the imagination: Essays on education, the arts, and social change. John Wiley & Sons.

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Hernandez, E. (1995/1996). Re-thinking margins and borders: An interview with Gloria Anzaldúa. Discourse, 18(1/2), 201–208. hooks, b. (2013). Writing beyond race: Living theory and practice. Routledge. Huggins, J. (1998). Sister girl: Writings of an aboriginal activist and historian. The University of Queensland Press. Kumalo, S. H. (2018). Epistemic justice through ontological reclamation in pedagogy: Detailingmutual (in) fallibility using inseparable categories. Journal of Education, 72. https://doi.org/10.17159/2520-9868/i72a01 Langton, M. (1993). Well, I heard it on the radio and I saw it on the television…: An essay for the Australian Film Commission on the politics and aesthetics of filmmaking by and about Aboriginal people and things. Australian Film Commission. Le Guin, U. K. (1989). Dancing at the edge of the world: Thoughts on words, women, places. Groove Press. Lugones, M. (2010). Toward a decolonial feminism. Hypatia, 25(4), 742–759. Maldonado-Torres, N. (2007). On the coloniality of being. Cultural Studies, 21(2– 3), 240–270. Marcus, J. (2004). Hearts of darkness: White women write race. Rutgers University Press. Mercer, C. (2018). The philosophical roots of Western misogyny. Philosophical Topics, 46(2), 183–208. Mignolo, W. D. (2011). Epistemic disobedience and the decolonial option: A manifesto. Transmodernity, 1(2), 3–23. Moreton-Robinson, A. (2015). The white possessive: Property, power, and indigenous sovereignty. University of Minnesota Press. Nakata, M. N. (2007). Disciplining the savages, savaging the disciplines (1st ed.). Aboriginal Studies Press. Penfield, W. (1961). To cultivate the groves of Academus. Canadian Medical Association Journal, 85(4), 173–177. Plato. The republic. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1497/1497-h/1497-h.htm Richardson, L. (2000). New writing practices in qualitative research. Sociology of Sport Journal, 17(1), 5–20. Rose, D. B. (2004). Reports from a wild country: Ethics for decolonisation. UNSW Press. Rose, D. B. (2022). Shimmer: Flying fox exuberance in worlds of peril. Edinburgh University Press. Rozelle-Stone, R., & Stone, L. (2017). The relevance of the radical: Simone Weil 100 years on. Continuum. Stewart, K. (2007). Ordinary affects. Duke University Press. Stewart, K. (2018). Writing, life. PMLA, 133(1), 186–189. Stone-Mediatore, S. (2013). Attending to others: Simone Weil and epistemic pluralism. Philosophical Topics, 41(2), 79–95. Trahar, S., Juntrasook, A., Burford, J., von Kotze, A., & Wildemeersch, D. (2019). Hovering on the periphery? ‘Decolonising’ writing for academic journals. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 49(1), 149–167. Tuck, E., & Yang, W. K. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 1–40.

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Watson, I. (1998). The power of the muldarbi, the road to its demise. Australian Feminist Law Journal, 11(1), 28–45. Weil, S. (1951/2010). Waiting on God (E. Crawford, Trans.). Routledge. Weil, S. (1952a). Gravity and grace. Routledge. Weil, S. (1952b). The need for roots: Prelude to a declaration of duties towards mankind (A. Wills, Trans.). Routledge. Weil, S. (1977). The Simone Weil reader (G. Panchias, Ed.). Moyer Bell. Woolf, V. (1929). A room of one’s own. Hogarth Press. Woolf, V. (1938). Three guineas. Hogarth Press. Woolf, V. (1954). A writer’s diary: Being extracts from the diary of Virginia Woolf (L. Woolf, Ed.). Harcourt, Inc. Woolf, V. (1980). The diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume III: 1925-1930 (A. E. Bell, Ed.). Hogarth Press. Woolf, V. (2008). Selected essays. (A. O. Bell, Ed.). Oxford World Classics, Oxford University Press 3G.

11 SLOW READING AS REFUSAL Doing Higher Education Differently Vivienne Bozalek

Introduction

Higher education across the world has been affected by colonial logics, neoliberalism and bureaucratic cultures, resulting in the increasing proliferation of corporatized, for-profit universities which are steeped in managerialism. The post-COVID climate which shook the world recently, including academia, has queered previously taken-for-granted assumptions, providing pause to think about alternative ways of resisting and refusing the contemporary neoliberal and colonial university. This chapter proposes that Slow reading as a central practice in academia and a form of Slow scholarship might provide possibilities of developing different sensibilities for reconfiguring academia. Slow reading is one way of discerning what matters and what is politically meaningful in a period of increasing permeation of market logics in higher education and as a way of decolonizing academic practices. In this chapter, I firstly situate myself within a particular context of refusal in South Africa. I then discuss neoliberalism and its effects on the university and academia, after which I consider refusal as a response to the entanglement of capitalism and coloniality in the university. The next part of the chapter introduces Slow scholarship, how it originated and spread to higher education. The final part of the chapter offers a number of propositions incorporating Slow sensibilities and practices which might be used to refuse neoliberalism and coloniality, through the example of Slow reading. In summary then, this chapter thus puts into conversation ideas about how neoliberalism and colonialism have had accentuated effects on DOI: 10.4324/9781003367314-15

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university in the late stages of global capitalism, the importance of resisting and refusing these logics in academia, and finally how cultivating sensibilities and practices from Slow reading contribute to refusing neoliberalism and colonialism in this sector. Refusal in South Africa

Having been born and lived in South Africa for the last six decades, a country where the violences of extraction, exploitation and expropriation of resources – land, people, animals and plants – were blatantly explicit, and acts of refusal have been and continue to be a vital part of responses to such violences. In South Africa, it is also clear that acts of refusal are nuanced and cannot be attributed to single causal factors, but they have certainly had significant impacts on the past, present and future of higher education. For example, various indigenous populations took up arms against the colonizers in the early days of colonization, as well as refusing colonial labour demands. At the turn of the century, the Anglo-Boer War and the refusal of the Boers to succumb to British Imperialism continues to impact on the way the trajectories of higher education are played out. The Defiance Campaign in the 1950s of defying unjust legislation, the Pan African Congress’s Anti-pass campaign where, on 21 March 1960, 69 people were massacred by the police for burning their passes which they were forced to carry at all times were acts of refusal. The black consciousness leader, Bantu Stephen Biko’s book I Write What I Like and his arrest, torture and subsequent death in detention were fundamental acts of refusal in South Africa. In the 1976 Soweto student uprisings, school children, as a response to being subjected to Bantu Education, refused to be taught in Afrikaans. This was an act of refusal that set forth school protests throughout the country and brought the education system to a halt for a number of years and led to alternative forms of education. I was born in South Africa and have ancestors who would be regarded as settlers, coming to the country from various parts of the United Kingdom. As a white South African, I was the recipient of privileged access to resources, including education at all levels. My elder brother was part of the African Resistance Movement (ARM) in the 1960s and had to flee the country when his cell was intercepted by the police and lived in exile until 1994 when South Africa became a democracy. The ARM’s blowing up of pylons was an act of refusal against the apartheid regime. As a mental health professional in the apartheid era, I was involved with Detention Treatment Team, an organization which provided workshops on how to survive torture to those who were in danger of being arrested, imprisoned and tortured by the apartheid regime – all acts of refusal

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against apartheid. We also assisted by debriefing of those who had been arrested and tortured, as well as others brutalized by the system through police violence and spending time in solitary confinement. We developed resources so that people could recognize that what they were going through (post-traumatic stress) was an expected part of state violence, rather than an individual pathology. For most of my academic career, I have worked at a historically black institution (HBI) which was regarded as “the intellectual home of the left” and welcomed those who had been in exile to its academic and support staff. In the 1980s, the HBI became a hotbed of acts of refusal against the state, with boycotts, arrests, police violence etc. The #Rhodes Must Fall and #Fees Must Fall protests were acts of refusal initiated in South Africa – the former at historically white institutions (HWIs) as a refusal of colonial education and the latter as a refusal to pay fees by students who do not have the means to do so. Neoliberalism in Higher Education

Neoliberalism has been defined as “a theory of political economic practice that proposes human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework, characterised by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade” (Harvey, 2005, p. 2). Through globalization, transnational capitalism and the growth of the knowledge economy, neoliberalism has become a driving factor in higher education (Harmes, Danaher & Riddle, 2017), resulting in the increasing marketization and corporatization of the university (Slaughter, 2014). Neoliberalism has diminished the public good focus of the university, focusing instead on promoting the university as a competitive business enterprise, serving students as paying customers and producing them as entrepreneurs, foregrounding vocation rather than education. This in turn has led to an expansion of casualized academic labour, the rise of new managerialist techniques, an audit culture, budget crises and subsequent controlling of how resources are allocated, affecting conditions of work negatively. In addition to this, administrative processes are overreliant on digitized data to increase levels of surveillance in the university (Collyer, 2015; Davies & Bansel, 2010; Davies & Petersen, 2005; Gearhart & Chambers, 2019; Honan, 2017; Riddle, 2017). The quantification of student numbers, student throughput, competency-based outcomes, instrumentalized academic output are what is valued rather than scholarship and learning which is meaningful, collective, collegial, quality-enhancing and processual. The fact that more than half of published articles are never read does not seem to matter to a system bent on profit and speed. It is not

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acknowledged that such “quick and dirty publication[s]” (Gearhart, 2019, p. 48, citing Worsham) do harm to academic disciplines. The corporatized university both is subjected to and creates a number of strategies designed to enhance status, income and prestige including funding subsidies, governance and control through senior management and executive deans (Marginson & Considine, 2000; Riddle, 2017). These systems exert a powerful effect on individual academics who get drawn into the reward system. For example, in South Africa, academics are paid for accredited publications through a research account (the universities all earn substantial fees from accredited publications). The h-index and Google citations count in research rating exercises, also earning prestige and funding. As Riddle (2017, p. 25) has observed, academics are now subjected to neoliberal imperatives regarding research, grant applications and publishing: Everywhere we are coded and constructed within the machine of the enterprise university to faithfully produce high quality research outputs and secure competitive external research funding grants. We are counted and graded, chopped up and classified, found to be acceptable (or otherwise) within the logical bounds of a system that rewards entrepreneurial and innovative research that secures large grants and is published in high-ranked research journals. These observations of the pressure of excessive and speedy publishing serve as a reminder that it is not the individual who should be blamed as complicit, docile and compliant in these circumstances, but the wider system of quantification and incentivization to perform where neoliberal logics have become common sense – the only seeming way of being (Gearhart, 2019). The neoliberal framework places the onus on individual students, academic teachers and scholars who are blamed for their own failure, rather than blaming the neoliberal system. The casualization of academic labour to create low cost to the system is also not conducive to challenging the neoliberal system and its logics (Collins, 2017). Forty to 50% of university teachers in the United States are part-time, are underpaid, have no benefits and are regarded as disposable, as they are easily replaceable (Gearhart, 2019). The system uses mechanisms like positive student evaluations of teaching, acceptance of scholarly articles, awards for research and teaching to interpolate academics through a discourse of lack (Charteris, Nye & Jones, 2017). The parlance used to describe higher education has also changed to one which used to be applicable to the realm of business and the military. Universities which have silently embraced the marketized values of

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neoliberalism are now pressurized to develop mission statements, strategic plans, self-reporting on student success as a commodity in reports and policy documents from universities as part of the audit culture (Gearhart, 2019). This neoliberal logic affects how academics intra-act with others, what they are able to be and to do and how they think about scholarship, rewarding those who assume the disposition of becoming entrepreneurs (Ball, 2012; Riddle, 2017). In order to gain entry to the academy, obtain tenure or get promotion the system sets ever-increasing standards in terms of metrics for academics to attain – continually increasing requirements and speeds of research outputs, successful grant applications and postgraduate throughputs. Ongoing performance reviews, appraisals and audits form part of the surveillance strategies of hyper-(ac)countability of measurable outcomes through which academics are monitored, controlled and regulated for their reported compliance to these increasingly unrealistic expectations of continuous improvement by state-sanctioned bodies which control resources. Neoliberalism as an advanced form of capitalism has emerged historically from colonialism as an integral part of the Empire and the violences endemic to higher education in both the Global South and the Global North (Andreotti et al., 2015). Neoliberal and neocolonial logics are inextricably bound up with colonial inheritances which impact on curriculum and academic practices, in that neoliberal agendas are based on individualism, future-oriented notions of progress, and other Eurocentric values and perspectives, perpetuating the violences of modernity (Ahlquist, 2011; Ferdinand, 2022; Fraser, 2022; Gyamera & Burke, 2018; Tuck & Yang, 2012). How might we resist succumbing to such neoliberal and neocolonial imperatives and surveillance of ourselves and our practices as academics whose worth and work is reduced to measurements through apparatuses which are transmitted imperceptibly through economic and utilitarian discourses of progress in the form of efficiency, effectiveness and impact (Honan, 2017; Riddle, 2017)? The next section thinks with writers who have rejected colonialism and neoliberalism and their homogenizing and reductivist logics, through a variety of practices of refusal. Refusal

Practices of refusal are a response to the violences of colonialism and neoliberalism and their effects on higher education. According to Tuck and Yang (2014a, 2014b), there is no general framework or rule for refusal; it is always something which is particular, and an orientation which is generative and expansive, “stepping outside of the academic industrial complex” (2014a, p. 238). In order to reconfigure academia differently, refusing

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the conquest and colonization of knowledges and thinking otherwise happens through a framework of desire, rather than pain narratives (Simpson, 2007). Refusal of settler colonial logics means to make explicit and interrogate the master narrative and mechanistic world view which facilitates expropriation and exploitation, the legacies of colonial acts of possessing land, people, animals and fauna as resources that can be used for the settlers’ own privilege and satisfaction (Ghosh, 2021; Simpson, 2007; Tuck & Yang, 2014a, b). Refusal can also be made possible through radical love which is a form of communal caregiving and responsibility (Ambo, 2018; Rodríguez, 2019), particularly for and by black and Indigenous students in historically white higher education institutions. Those writing about refusal have considered various paths of resistance through undoing, unsettling, altering, destablizing, disrupting, disobeying and subverting neoliberal and colonial logics in academia (Campt, 2017; Franklin-Phipps, 2022; Harney & Moten, 2013; Kanwischer & Ray, 2019; Sojoyner, 2017). Many black writers link refusal to fugitivity or black flight from colonial masters and a refusal to use the master’s tools – refusing what has been refused you (Campt, 2017; Franklin-Phipps, 2022; Harney & Moten, 2013; Sojoyner, 2017). Boon, Butler and Jeffries (2018, p. 70) describe fugitive refusal as that “which gnaws away at the terms of imperialist and colonial domination, [it] is inevitably wild, unruly, excessive, chaotic, dissonant, and anarchic”. It is also seen as a strategy of survival (Rodríguez, 2019). Jack Halberstam (2011) provides a valuable example of refusal to engage with the neoliberal notion of academic success and mastery through the activist irreverence of celebrating a language of failure. They emphasize the importance of focusing on minor, political, revolutionary or subjugated knowledges, those which do not at the moment count in higher education, where expert knowledges are both standardized and regularized (Davies & Bansel, 2010). Refusal can be regarded as a double radical praxis – it is about maintaining a presence in academia – the refusal to remain invisibilized or to disappear, as well as the unwillingness to comply with neoliberal and colonizing logics (Ferreira da Silva, 2018). Fred Moten and Stefano Harney (2013) propose that it is important to reshape possibilities, desire and hope by refusing respectability. Damien Sojoyner (2016, 2017) and Asilia Franklin-Phipps (2022) have written about the importance of Black fugitivity and refusal in relation to the Black public education system, which they see as violent and enclosed spaces of containment, likening it to the prison system, and sharing a logic of incapacitation to produce black social, economic and political misery, all the while blaming individual students themselves for their failure,

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instead of the system. This education system is rooted “in a liberal tradition of social progress, the current realities of Black education are mired in a brutal system of punitive containment and curricular evisceration” (Sojoyner, 2017, p. 516). Sojoyner builds on Tina Campt’s argument that “the concept of fugitivity highlights the tension between the acts or flights of escape and creative practices of refusal, nimble and strategic practices that undermine the category of the dominant” (Campt in Sojoyner, 2017, p. 516). Franklin-Phipps (2022) and Sojoyner (2017) show how strategic and tactical acts of refusal have been, and continue to be, crucial to Black radical action in the context of capitalism’s violent conditions for Black lives. Franklin-Phipps (2022) discusses how Black women rappers like BbyMutha reconfigure cultural landscapes of white supremacy. deploying embodied performances of refusal through rap music and hip-hop. Sojoyner (2017) writes about Black fugitivity and the refusal to be subject to commonsense neoliberal rhetoric of conflating “education with future economic and social success”, by denying forms of violence in enclosed classroom spaces and criminalizing fugitivity (Sojoyner, 2017, p. 530). With regard to the university, Moten and Harney (2013) propose that in refusing to call others to order, for example in the classroom, opportunities are created to initiate creative practices – what they refer to as “study” by which they mean productive learning. Moten and Harney (2013) also call out the critical academic who is adept at the logics of for and against. They refuse to be for or against but work as subversive intellectuals within the university – being in it and remaking it, rather than indulging in the misery of academia. They are fugitives in the university, proposing the value of states of dispossession or homelessness posing the question: Can this being together in homelessness, this interplay of the refusal of what has been refused, this undercommon appositionality, be a place from which emerges neither self-consciousness nor knowledge of the other but an improvisation that proceeds from somewhere on the other side of an unasked question? (Harney & Moten, 2013, p. 96) This refusal of what has been refused or refusal to remain in one’s place is what Tina Campt (2017) refers to as the quotidian practice of refusal, by which she means creative and strategic practices of refusal which renounce and undermine the validity the premises of white supremacy that pathologize and subordinate Blackness. What is clear, then, in the literature on refusal in academia, is that it is not merely about individuals refusing hegemonic discourses and metrics and other requirements of the colonial and enterprise university, or

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scrutinizing hegemonic forms of academia, but involves cultivating alternative practices for reconfiguring academic scholarship. One such alternative practice is Slow reading, which can provide spaces for a larger movement in doing academia differently. Slow reading as one example of an embodied act of refusal which rejects neoliberal and colonial structures and processes, is borne from the conviction that another way of doing academia is possible (Ferdinand, 2022). As such, it is a form of experimentation, improvisation, occupation of liminal spaces, disruption, undisciplining, in ways that disrupt colonial and neoliberal logics. Slow, transversal and transdisciplinary reading as an act of refusal has the potential to enliven academic practices by creating something new and unexpected through not knowing in advance where the practice might lead. The next section of the chapter considers what it would mean to refuse the common sense of both colonial individualist logics and the expediency of managerialist culture of profit and appropriation of resources for the university. The section proposes that Slow reading as a form of Slow scholarship might be one generative way refusing and, in so doing, contributing to reconfiguring the neoliberal and colonial institution. Slow1 Scholarship

As has been discussed in the section on neoliberalism, the corporate university values efficiency, productivity, quantification and speed over thoughtfulness and depth. In considering how we can refuse the logics of neoliberalism and colonization, Gearhart and Chambers (2019) put forward the idea that Slow scholarship might have something generative to offer. The Slow movement started in Rome in 1989 when Carlo Petrini and a group of protesters objected to the opening of a MacDonald’s fast-food restaurant in the Piazza di Spagna leisurely eating bowls of pasta. This led to the initiation of the Slow Food Movement across 15 countries and the development of a Slow Food Manifesto, which railed against fastfood production and consumption of food. The Slow Food Manifesto stressed the importance of pleasure and leisureliness in eating food, where local food was considered preferable. The Slow movement also foregrounded the importance of ecological issues, made explicit, for example, in the Citta Slow (Slow cities) movement, which started in Tuscany in 1989 and spread to other cities in the world (Sohn, Jang & Jung, 2015). There were 55 criteria in the Citta Slow manifesto, falling broadly into the following categories “environmental policy, infrastructure, quality of urban fabric, encouragement of local produce and products, hospitality and community and Citta Slow awareness” (Gearhart & Chambers. 2019.p.11).

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Slow Travel resisted a tourist way of journeying, emphasizing interactions with the surrounds, sharing living arrangements with local people, sensory immersion into the particularities of a context with s/low carbon modalities (Fullagar, Markwell & Wilson, 2012; Tam, 2008). Slow also extended to journalism (Le Masurie, 2015, 2019) (quality and deeper analysis), art (Lindner & Meissner, 2015) and theatre, foregrounding more meditative practices (Arons, 2019; Chambers, 2019). In academia, the Slow movement provides a way of challenging the dominant neoliberal ethos of universities of focusing on the individual and the product by valuing relationality and process in the everyday. Rayzberg and Smith (2019) are critical of Berg and Seeber’s text The Slow Professor, which they claim remains entangled in the neoliberal framework that Berg and Seeber (2016) seek to resist, as “the temporality that Berg and Seeber imagine is one in which individuals modify their use of time and their relation to it in order to experience greater autonomy and happiness” (p. 56). Here they fall into the trap of a self-help culture, where academics individually seek to resist through improving their own mental and physical health, thus putting the responsibility on the individual rather than social and material structures and, in so doing, reinforcing the injunctions and inequalities of the neoliberal and colonial university. In refusing the market economy, the Slow movement provides an alternative and inventive way of being/becoming, different ways of knowing and doing, and a different politics and ethics to neoliberalism and colonization. Slow scholarship disturbs the neoliberal humanist universalized ideal of the Vitruvian man – the autonomous, unencumbered, able-bodied, neurotypical, white, middle-class, rational and stable subject (Mountz et al., 2015). How might Slow reading as a form of Slow scholarship create ways to refuse, subvert and challenge neoliberalism and colonization in higher education? How might it help us to see flashes of potential in doing academia differently? The next section considers these two questions by developing some propositions for Slow reading. Slow Reading as Refusal

According to Gearhart and Chambers (2019) the Slow movement has helped to cultivate thoughtfulness, imagination, compassion and a sense of social justice in higher education. In this section of the chapter, I develop several propositions for refusing settler and neoliberal logics and structures, through the example of Slow reading as a form of Slow scholarship. Propositions allow one to ask speculative questions about how Slow

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reading might refuse neoliberalism by enacting different ways of doing academia. Propositions provide ways of considering alternative potentialities that Slow reading might engender – “[p]ropositions do not give information as to how they function in concrete instances but gesture to how they could potentialize…” (Truman & Springgay, 2016, p. 259). Rather than being sets of instructions or prescriptive rules to follow, propositions are thoughts in motion, giving rise to experimentation and improvisation, not knowing in advance what may come to occur (Truman & Springgay, 2016). Propositions, which emanate from the work of Alfred North Whitehead (1978), refer to inflections or forces of what may come to be expressed and how a situation becomes open to change (Manning, 2008, Manning & Massumi, 2014). They are also known as enabling constraints or constraining enablements (Massumi, 2015). Refuse Superficial Reading of Large Tracts of Texts

Slow reading invites a deep, careful and close reading of complex texts, rather than consuming vast amounts of text superficially. Slow reading also involves in-depth discussions of texts. Arons (2019) uses such Slow reading in theatre, where the practice is known as “table work”, where students are trained to sit around a table and each read a line or two of the text, doing a “curious and close” reading of a play aloud as actors on stage would to ensure everyone understands the language and plot of the play (Arons, 2019, p. 189). Slow reading provides the opportunities to dwell with the text, to hesitate and deliberate, suspending judgement in an open immersion with the text (Boulous Walker, 2016; Haraway, 2016). A Slow close reading is similar to what Karen Barad (2007) refers to as a diffractive reading, which is elaborated in the next proposal. Refuse Disciplinary Boundaries and Refuse Critique: Practice Diffractive Slow Reading

A diffractive reading, as put forward by Karen Barad (2007), is a process where one or more text, theory or oeuvre is read through another or others. Usually in conventional academic practices, one text is foregrounded, compared and contrasted against the other, which is backgrounded. Diffraction does not fix a subject and object as pre-existing in advance of relationships, which makes a diffractive reading different from conventional reading of literature reviews, where one text as a fixed frame of reference is read against another. A diffractive methodology involves a detailed reading of mutually informative insights through each other and attending to

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entanglements of resonance and dissonance, what is excluded and what comes to matter. In a diffractive reading, for example, Barad reads poststructuralist theory, science studies, philosophy and quantum physics through each other in order to arrive at new enriched understandings, which are good to think with and contribute to their agential realist ethicoonto-epistemology (Barad, 2007). Such a reading requires attentiveness to the specificities of the text and an attunement to the different patterns of relationality and how they matter in knowledge-making practices. This requires re-turning of the texts (turning them over and over again) and seeing how in each iteration, patterns shift. A diffractive reading is a form of refusal to engage in the epistemic damaging processes of putting down or othering the work of academics through the practice of critique, which requires a stance of distance and superiority about knowing better, and as Harney and Moten (2013) and Ferreira da Silva (2018) observe, critique should be refused as it has become a formulaic ritual which is expected of mainstream academics. Barad (2017) concurs, noting that while Slow reading, which they describe as a detailed attention to words so that insights may be allowed to flash up, is an anticapitalist praxis: [T]here is nothing inherent in critique that makes it anticapitalist; critique too can be a handmaiden of capitalism, engaging in and enabling a continuing logic of disposability and training the mind to operate in the mode of progress, always looking to the next exciting idea, turning aside the old in favor of the new. (p. 65) Rather than dismissing what is written in a text and moving on to the next trendy theory, a diffractive reading is an affirmative and creative form of sense-making through working and reworking patterns of understanding and in so doing, coming to inventive provocations which make a difference (Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012). An affirmative diffractive reading is an ethical practice, where the details of the text are engaged with carefully and respectfully and justice is done to the ideas of the text, rather than comparing by pitting one text against another. Whichever texts are engaged with, none are considered to be pre-existing or given, but rather come into being through a relational process. Such relational ontologies or cosmopolitics of relation are inherent to decolonial approaches to academia (Ferdinand, 2022). A Slow and diffractive reading also invites a sensibility of responsiveness to texts – a response-ability, where each returning to texts engenders a different response to the details of the texts, and where one is changed through each encounter.

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Refuse Instrumental Reading: Seek Pleasure in Slow Reading

Those writing about Slow reading have discussed how pleasure is both politically important and conducive to scholarly philosophy and practice in academia. Here pleasure is defined as affective2 and relational in an intensive vitalist Spinozist sense (what a body can be and do), and includes sensibilities such as “affirmation, affordance, flow, focus, fulfillment, happiness, heightened consciousness, immersion, joy, motivation, and self- actualization in various academic environments” (Harmes, Danaher, & Riddle, 2017. p. 2). Rather than seeing pleasure as self-indulgent, Harmes, Danaher and Riddle (2017) point out its political importance as an intensity for replenishing and regenerating the work and lives of academics. In its focus on depth, pleasure and quality, a practice of Slow reading provides a way of resistance or refusal of metrics and accountability. Nietzsche’s ([1881] 1982, p.5) advice to read “with doors left open, with delicate eyes and fingers” (cited in Boulous Walker, 2016, p. 24) is an apt resistance to the injunction of the neoliberal to master the content and pin down the facts in a dull containment of knowledge. Bright (2017) proposes a kind of writing in academia, which can also apply to Slow reading, one that is pleasurable and subversive, as part of an ongoing process of becoming, a partial account, a way of life rather than merely a desire to know (Boulous Walker, 2016). It refuses convention and dominant modes of being. This kind of Slow writing produces movement and change, forms new connections, discomforts and unsettles taken-forgranted assumptions, thus enabling an undoing of the self (see Bozalek et al. (2021) for an example of pleasurable, intensive, intimate collaborative group reading. In this online reading group, it was possible to think and to learn by engaging in a close, attentive process, where the authors read aloud to each other for a few hours every day during the COVID-19 pandemic).

Refuse Individualism: Practice Collaborative and Collective Slow Reading

Refusing the single-authored article which is seen as the primary mechanism of success for academic promotion and funding means revaluing a relational view of scholarship and pedagogy. Comparing and contrasting “this” text with “that” text also assumes a metaphysics of individualism (Barad, 2007). Collaborative, collegial and collective processes and modes of inquiry – seeking out collective collaboration on academic projects – provide ways of combating the tendency of individual consumption of texts. This can help lessen the burden on individuals and experiences of isolation, providing companionship through inquiry. Collaboration also

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enriches receptive thinking through attentive listening and has the potential to generate new insights through conversations. These processes help provide spaces for cross-pollination of ideas through transdisciplinary approaches which are more expansive in imagination than approaching issues through disciplinary lenses. Collaborative endeavours also have the benefit of disseminating ideas to a larger audience and hence greater visibility for marginalized knowledges which would otherwise remain hidden or local (Magelssen & Lunderman 2019). Spending time in collaborative reading groups creates the possibilities of building genuine relationships and co-creation of ideas which might provide the potential of meaningful writing together, forging intellectual bonds for future collaboration, leaving behind the pretentiousness of institutional individualist defensive and authoritative facades. Thompson and Harney (2018) refuse institutional individualism through what they call “reading camps”, where they engage in collaborative Slow reading together as an art form, a refuge and a refusal of the privatization of reading in the university. They see the Slow reading study group as an important anti-colonial practice, similar to reading study groups that were set up by the Black Panthers, which they considered to be at the heart of their revolutionary practice. Refuse Dominant Institutional Practices of Competitiveness, Meritocracy and Hierarchy

Boulous Walker (2016) sees it important to refuse the lure of what she calls the contemporary corporate orientation of institutional readings, by which she means “ones that reduce thought to information extraction or mining’ and “pillages thinking as a productive resource” (p. xv), in institutional spaces of publish or perish, where hasty judgements are required. It is a disengaged reductive mode of reading driven by an anxiety of knowing something quickly. Neoliberalism also leads to selfish accumulation of resources like reading matter, prioritizing self-interest in order to get ahead in academia. As far as possible, provide reading material for all by using open educational resources, or encourage students and academics to share reading resources. It is important to refuse systems of surveillance and monitoring individuals about whether they have read texts or not. Collaborative Slow, close and attentive reading practices, reading together and aloud, with no presuppositions of the text, facilitating rather than eroding trust. It also takes into account the precarity of certain people who lack the fiscal resources to participate in reading practices, placing pressure on them to secure reading resources which may be beyond their means or not available in certain

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historically disadvantaged academic institutions. Sharing such resources in reading groups takes the pressure off energies to accumulate readings in difficult circumstances and help to level the unequal playing fields in higher education. The propositions on refusing neoliberal and settler logics and institutional practices in higher education through rethinking reading as a Slow process of refusal are useful on many levels. Firstly, they encourage indepth engagement with texts and attentiveness to the details of texts, rather than a superficial skimming of texts. Secondly, they value re-turning of texts and an immersiveness rather than a once-off mastery of texts, so often assumed in academic work. Thirdly, collaborative, collegial reading aloud together with genuine curiosity and wonder in a generous context where all are there to learn has the effect of diminishing hierarchical relations, inviting those involved into the realms of otherness and strangeness. Fourthly, Slow reading resists the consumerist ethos of more is better, focusing instead on the re-turning and re-engaging with complex and meaningful texts which really matter. Finally, it is the process that matters in Slow reading, rather than the product, and the process should be a pleasurable one and an artful one, so that all are keen to continue with it, instead of regarding reading as a burden or something which is done in one’s spare time, and one which can contribute to various processes of refusal of the neoliberal and colonial university. Conclusion

Viewed against the backdrop of the increasing corporatization of universities and their colonial roots through the occupation of indigenous lands, this chapter has thought with literature on refusal and Slow reading to develop propositions as a way of becoming a site of refusal of the settler and market logics of neoliberalism which have permeated academia internationally for decades now (Museus & Wang, 2022). Neoliberalism and colonialism have both infected the ways in which academia functions and those in government and senior management have actively reinforced and reinscribed such logics through systems which reward hypercompetitiveness, individuality, neurotypical whiteness, where the emphasis is on those who bring credits through fiscal revenue to the institution (such as funding for the minimizing the time for throughput rate of students and the quantification metrics of academic publications). Slow reading as a central academic practice of refusal is a political gesture for resisting the processes of becoming tools which the settler state and university exploits (Boulous Walker, 2016; Museus & Wang, 2022), by deliberating and dwelling with texts in generous and giving collaborative engagements

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with colleagues and students. Through the sociality of collective engagement with Slow reading, it is more possible to be aware of the neoliberal structures and discourses and to attempt to refuse settler neoliberal individualist logics of self-interested promotion, and academic plundering, pursuing more pleasurable and equitable practices, and disrupting hierarchies of institutional and individual worth. Notes 1 Slow is not about the speed or slowness of linear temporality, but about queering time (Bozalek, 2017, 2021a, b,c). Neither is it about returning to an idyllic past. Carl Honore of the Slow movement referred to Slow as tempo giusto, meaning the right speed (Gearhart & Chambers, 2019, p. 9). 2 See also the chapter by Zembylas on the affective dimensions of refusal in this edited collection.

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AFTERWORD Begin with a Refusal Ella Martindale, Kaitlin Rizarri, John Pierre Craig, Jo Billows, and Jacqueline L. Scott

We have read the book that precedes this afterword. Over conversations, walks, Zoom meetings, and moments of quiet companionship, we have collectively thought (and felt) through the book’s promises, limitations, offerings, and echoes. This afterword is our response, a response that is both informed by our own engagement with theories of refusal and decolonization in our scholarly work, and informed by our own ancestral epistemologies. As Black and Indigenous scholars, refusal is part of our ancestral epistemologies. We write together as a group of the next generation of scholars who carry these epistemologies forward and into the present. When considering how to approach writing this afterword, Kaitlin thought that we could bring the land into our writing. Ella offered a phrase that came to her in a conversation with a friend: “the land misses us when we are gone.” Through our writing we consider what the land and our relations teach us about refusal, we situate ourselves in higher education, and offer the following vignettes as a way to write in refusal. refusal interrupts refusal attends refusal becomes refusal complicates

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JP sits in front of their laptop. I listen to a few colleagues talk about their relations to land. Many of these stories are told in relation to homelands, to a sense of obligations here and elsewhere, to teachings passed down about ethical relations to land. I think about how I might enter the conversation as a descendant of those enslaved and emancipated. I know that we made a people of ourselves, and that ways we (re)make ourselves often take place on the land. The river baptism, potlucks and family reunions at the park, the Black history month parade flowing through the city streets, crawfish boils and a boucherie in a grandparent’s backyard. My body recalls the ways my communities have practised being in relation with one another and the land. We gather at public parks, in church parking lots, on street corners. It makes sense then that I feel a knot of tension here; my people are elsewhere, and we make relations to land together. Summertime: Kaitlin is walking in Tkaronto. I walk past a garden I worked at a couple of years ago, and I see little tmawey plants growing out of the cracks of the sidewalk – some fully flowering due to the scorching Tkaronto summers, the concrete contrasting with their fluorescent gentle florals. Tmawey is so abundant, I think to myself. She spread her seeds from last summer to now, reaching across a fence and almost onto the street where we drive our cars. A little offering was planted and now hundreds of baby tmawey plants are ready for harvest. Our relations grow here, too. We just need to tend to them. Kaitlin and Ella are eating lunch near Robarts library, at their favourite Vietnamese spot. We talk about how the building pipes in downtown Tkaronto are like creeks in a watershed, and how we don’t go to the lake enough – we don’t really get a chance. Yet, we know water flows through the city pipes in ways not unlike a watershed. There are flowing streams in every house, restaurant, store and buildings at the University of Toronto where we write this piece from, that are all connected to some common water source. I say to Kaitlin that, on the concrete sidewalks, it is sometimes hard to remember that we are on the land, but notions of city pipes as a constructed watershed remind us that we are not that far from the lake. I mention to Ella that my friend recently posted to her Instagram story: “Does anyone know where our water sources come from? Are they coming from Lake Ontario, exclusively?” As an urban farmer, I thought, why don’t I know this? I want to find out.

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Kaitlin takes the subway to the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto. It is the turn of summer to fall, and I notice the cedar tree planted outside OISE facing Bloor Street. Living within bounded cement planters, I wonder how the cedar gets the water they need – although cedar is drought-resistant, they thrive in moist, nutrient-dense areas, like near a swamp or creek. Ella takes a break from Zoom meetings and puts her sneakers on. Since moving to Tkaronto, I routinely walk the same route while listening to music or calling my friends and family. I take the same streets up towards Casa Loma so I can gaze out at the southern part of the city and the CN tower before heading down the stairs towards home. In all the places I have lived, I have walked in similar circular routes. These circles allow me to understand where I am as I traverse the same paths over and over again. In this way, the place becomes its own alongside my steps. The landscape in its particularities starts to know me as I come to know it. I walk through green spaces with children’s playgrounds and stone benches; past lamp stores, cozy and quaint restaurants, vibrant crosswalks; under the train tracks; past familiar art and landmark signs; up the hill and towards the viewpoint. The view might be tinted grey, cold blue, soft yellow or warm pink; the lake is hardly visible beyond the dense cityscape. Jo chooses a route for one of their daily dog walks. I like walking through the laneways and back-alley paths in my neighbourhood rather than on the sidewalks. I like the art spray painted on garage doors and fences, the glimpses of backyard vegetable gardens, and encountering rabbits and other quiet neighbours who choose these quieter paths. On my phone, I use an app to identify and record the sounds of birds around me. I want to learn who is sharing this space with me. Getting to know their calls, their colours and their names. House Sparrow, Northern Cardinal, Downy Woodpecker, Dark-Eyed Junco. I wonder about the other names they go by, and what they call themselves. Jacqueline spots a bird. A Red-tail Hawk circles overhead as I walk through the park. The pigeons scatter; none want to be the hawk’s dinner. The name of things is often a window into their relationship with the land and with humans. The scientific name for the hawk is Buteo jamaicensis – a name forged when a Jamaican specimen was taken to Britain on a slave ship, packed among the cargo of sugar and rum. The pain encoded in the scientific name cannot dull the beauty of the hawk in flight.

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After a month living in Tkaronto, Ella misses the ocean. I borrow a friend’s car and drive up through suburbs and past smaller cities until I find a lake that looks much like the lakes from back home. On the West Coast, I am used to swimming in the ocean all year round and in lakes during the warmer months. It is October, and a person who is walking here thinks it is brave that I go for a quick swim, feeling the cold and gentle waves on my face. I know then that without this touch of the water on my skin, I wouldn’t be able to imagine exactly what kind of relation I am to those in Tkaronto. Driving back, I know that I must continue to live alongside the water, even in vast urban spaces, even if only in small doses. The winter makes Kaitlin miss the medicines she grows at the community farm during the warmer months. On my way to Ella’s house in the middle of a snowstorm, I see a mullein plant thriving in her backyard – an infinity for the lungs. During a global pandemic with increasing cases in Tkaronto during that month, mullein’s placement right in front of her basement apartment seems intentional. Mullein’s fuzzy leaves are like a waving hand from a friend. Jo records bird sounds on their walk. Coming from the West Coast, I am used to evergreen winters. Here, it seems like everything dulls as the cold sets in and the urban landscapes become a beige-ish grey and grey-ish white. After living here a few winters, I have come to appreciate the bright blue sky and the red flash of cardinals in the bare trees. I spot another flash of colour – Blue Jays. I take out my phone to record them, to include them among the other birds I have seen on my walk. I wait a couple of minutes, but they do not make a sound. I wonder if they know they are being recorded. Perhaps this is their refusal, I think. My dog is impatient for us to continue our walk. I stop the recording and put my phone away. Jacqueline walks through a city park. The promises of spring are filled with lies, I think. The returning warmth and bright sunlight awaken the flowers sleeping in gardens and parks. I see species of tulips and daffodils – some of which are deemed invasive – that have settled within Canada’s imposed borders through processes of settlercolonialism. I think about how within Canada’s public school curriculum, some flowers are seen as neutral harbingers of spring. I wonder about their relations and how they hold histories tied to the settlers who brought them here.

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Kaitlin and Ella are thinking together about refusal in higher education; they are thinking about land. We are talking about “Taddle Creek” – a waterway on top of which the University of Toronto is built. Like many other creeks, streams and rivers in Tkaronto, it has vanished underneath city structures and has been mostly forgotten. By talking about it, we do not forget about it. As we work at the University of Toronto, we are bringing with us not only the waters that run through Tkaronto, but those from the places we call home. However, we know our waters are continuously impacted by academic presence – sometimes literally, as it exists on top of our rivers. As the city winter begins to thaw, Jo thinks of springtime plant harvesting. Harvesting medicines starts with the intention: to gather plants to make a skin salve. I learned how to make salve back on Coast Salish territory, and I’m glad to be able to connect to those teachings here; grateful to be able to care for myself and others in this way. I want to be able to share salve with friends and distribute some through giveaways. Late last spring, as the season turned to summer, I noticed medicines in my neighbourhood: a patch of plantain in an elevated section of a neighbour’s yard, away from dogs and foot traffic; mullein growing in marginal spaces along fences and rocky walls. I thought about what else I might include in my salve, holding my intentions as I walked. Then, I noticed for the first time yarrow in abundance in two other neighbours’ yards. A bit farther in my walk, along the upper banks of the Humber River, I saw pink flowers growing, suddenly in bloom. Red clover. Plantain. Mullein. Yarrow. There are other plants I might have included, but they didn’t show themselves to me during that time, so I didn’t. Jacqueline walks to a community consultation on a revitalization plan, led by city parks. At the community consultation, I want to ask why this mainly Brown, Indigenous, and Black neighbourhood has so few city-planted street trees – even in the shiny new revitalization plans. City of Toronto Parks has historically removed old growth trees during the process of gentrification – trees that our families have lived with and around for generations, trees that children get shade from during hot Tkaronto summers. I hesitate, worried that a question like that might paint me as the angry Black woman, but I ask anyway. There is power in breaking silence. I refuse to accept that the trees and plants have to be absent, as if they are not important.

Afterword  203

Kaitlin is talking to a professor about growing food on campus. “I’m not sure the school would approve of having food growing on our balcony for students”. I ask, “Why not?” “I think it may call into question the cleanliness of the food and what type of establishment the school is”. I walk away in confusion. The establishment of the school should be open to building structures of sustenance – indeed, the university is likely an establishment with financial and spatial capacity to offer this integrated pedagogical approach to food. A couple of blocks away from the professor’s office, I passed a community garden. A sign read: take what you need. In another city park, on another day, Jo and Jacqueline attend a feast, fire and giveaway. For the giveaway, people share things they have made, grown or harvested. Jacqueline receives one of the salves I made. Jams and earrings and squash and knitwear are all on offer. Wild rice and seeds are passed around. I choose some dried cedar, feeling a yearning for home. The land is happy to see us. Ella awaits spring for the first time in Tkaronto. In my basement apartment, I remember how normal it feels to be on Coast Salish territory, and specifically on Quw’utsun tumuhw – to be in the presence of landscapes that know my ancestors so well. I imagine the round mountains that line the edges of Quw’utsun and point to the sea. Last year, I was telling a friend how special it was to get to know my ancestral land better and be in good relation there. They said, “the land is happy to see you”. They reminded me that the land misses us when we are gone. Knowing this now, I bring myself to other land relations as a guest, determined to show the land that I am here – and I bring my relations with me. The land misses us when we are gone. Kaitlin thinks of home. I visit Elmastukwek; it is a necessary grounding. I climb a rockside that brings me to the top of a hill overlooking the bush that my grandmother, my aunties and my uncles would frequent as children to pick berries. When a monument to a colonizer was emplaced there, many of the berry bushes went away. My family started to work in a nearby factory. I am looking out past the monument, the berries, the forest and towards the ocean beyond. I get a notification from my outlook calendar: “lab meeting”, happening in 24 hours. JP sits with a mentor to discuss their research interests. One day, I tell a close mentor that I want to study the ways higher education engages with environmental sustainability. She looks at me for a quiet

204  Ella Martindale et al.

moment, then says, “But you don’t care about the university”. Before I can argue, she continues, “From what you’ve told me, you care about the land and you care about community, but you do not really care about the university”. “Yeah, you’re right”, I say, beginning to smile. I feel freer, like someone has given me permission to be myself in this place away-from-home. This realization is a new map. It is a gift and a reminder of my obligations to the land and to the specificities of Black life and Black places and spaces. I may not have come to this realization as quickly without this mentor. She showed me then, and has many times since, how someone working in the academy can listen to and honour students in ways that create bridges and flight paths out of settler-colonial ways of being and back to self, community and land. refusal toward here where

INDEX

Pages followed by “n” refer to notes. ableist patriarchy 46 abolitionist 9, 37, 108–109, 115, 121, 125, 128, 130, 137, 139; see also political Aboriginal 9, 77–89, 170n6, 174n13 Aboriginal child 77, 85, 87 Aboriginal knowledges 82, 84 Aboriginal students 77, 79, 81–82 Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander 174n13 absolution 117 academic 1–3, 5, 7, 9, 15–16, 18–19, 23–25, 48–49, 62, 69, 77, 81–82, 89, 94, 98, 120, 134, 139, 145–147, 150, 152–153, 160, 161n5, 164–168, 168n2, 169n5, 170n6, 171n8, 172n9, 172n10, 174n13, 175n16, 180, 182–187, 189, 191, 193 academic writing 9, 164–166, 168n1, 172n9, 172n10, 175n16 academy 2, 10, 15–16, 22, 25–26, 37, 80, 98–99, 118, 127–128, 130, 165, 168n2, 169n5, 184 access 15, 24–25, 112–115, 126–127, 175, 181; see also system accountable 117–118, 120, 152

accumulation 5, 19, 22, 33, 192; see also capital; experiences; riches; wealth action 6, 8, 17, 28, 30–31, 37, 39, 66, 93–95, 98–104, 146, 152, 172n9, 186 affect alien 8, 15, 24 Affect aliens 24 affective energy 24 affective practice see refusal affectively 5, 8, 16, 29, 35, 39–40 affirmative see practice, negation, reading, recognition Africa 4, 53, 56, 125–129, 136, 138, 139n4, 180–183 African descent 52, 101 Africanisation 7, 124–126, 128, 131–132, 136, 138–139 Africans 54, 125–127, 131, 138, 159 Afrikaans 126, 181 Afro-­Slovenes 58n3 Agamben 60 agora style arrangements 97 Akadēmos 166 alienation 22, 77 alternative 1, 6, 23, 30–32, 36–37, 40, 66, 103, 111, 118–119, 124, 129,

206  Index

139, 145, 155, 160, 166, 180–181, 187–189; see also archive; imagination; orientations; practice; praxis ancestors 46, 51, 53–54, 181 anger 2, 9, 54, 93, 99, 101–104, 138 Ansloos and Peltier 64–65 Anthropocene 1, 5 anthropology 2 anti-­Asian 120 anti-­BIPOC 9, 95, 98–99, 101, 103–104 anti-­capitalist 33, 35, 38, 190 anti-­colonial 8, 38, 62 anti-­education 84 antiracism 7, 19, 94, 100–101 antiracist consciousness 96 Anzaldúa 171 apartheid 126, 181 Archives 9, 149–150, 152, 160 Archives of Possibility 145, 147 assessment mechanisms 36 assumptions 5, 7, 102, 114, 131, 137, 180, 191; see also taken-­for-­granted Athena 166 attention 4–5, 10, 15–16, 29, 32, 36, 39, 46, 59, 61, 66, 94, 97, 108, 121, 131, 164–166, 169n5, 170n6, 172n9, 172n10, 190 audit see culture Australian 8, 77–84, 88, 150, 172n10, 174n13 authority 6, 30, 48–49, 57n1, 58n3, 67, 112, 146, 149, 171 authorized 9, 36, 146–148, 150, 160 autoethnographic 9, 96 autonomy 33, 71n2, 111, 165, 168, 188 autopoietic see institution Balkanization 2, 52 Ball 59, 61–62, 68–70, 77, 79, 85–86, 88, 184 Barad 189–191 Bartleby 66 Bhungalia 2, 6, 28, 30–31, 62, 67, 112, 156 bioaxiological 150, 159 biopolitical 3, 63, 147, 152 birds 200–201 Black 2–5, 8, 10–11, 26–27, 49, 52–54, 56, 58, 62, 72–74, 81, 90,

93–96, 98–100, 102, 105–107, 109, 112, 119–122, 125–126, 130–131, 134–135, 140–142, 148, 150, 153, 162–163, 185, 192, 195–196, 198–199, 202, 204 Black and Minority Ethnic (BAME) 94 black flight 185 Black Lives Matter 121, 154 Black radical tradition 112, 121 black woman 17 Blackness 49, 51, 56, 186 blockage points see Sara Ahmed bodies 3, 5, 9, 15–16, 18, 21–23, 25–26, 46, 52–53, 57, 64, 78, 98, 104, 120, 136, 146, 150, 167, 169n5, 170n6, 184 bounded 16, 153 bureaucratic 157, 180 bureaucratisation 36 Canadian 45, 51, 53, 56, 93–94, 147, 157 capacity 47, 60, 114, 117, 124, 129, 132–133, 146, 148, 152, 160 capital 5, 19, 32–33, 82, 117, 131, 135, 137, 172n9 capitalism 5, 25, 32, 40, 78, 114, 124, 130, 155, 180, 182, 184, 186, 190 centre see colonial certainty 33, 139 change 5, 9, 15, 39, 47, 60, 71n6, 79, 81–83, 85–86, 102, 109–111, 115, 121, 124, 129, 131–132, 134, 189, 191 Chow 45 cisgender 61, 111 cisgendered 61 citizenship 4, 31, 136, 146, 172 civilizing 149, 157 class 16, 19, 21, 51, 53–54, 57n1, 79–81, 96, 114–115, 139n9, 159, 161n5, 167, 168n1, 188 classification 36, 139n2, 157 classroom 6, 39, 46–49, 51, 53–57, 78–79, 86, 117, 186 Coast Salish 202–203 collaboration 18, 125, 191 colleagues 15, 17, 20–22, 25, 46, 56, 94, 96–98, 113–114, 120, 137, 194 collective 24, 78, 87, 109, 113–114, 120, 124–125, 130, 137, 155, 169n5, 182, 191, 194

Index  207

college 16–17, 108, 113 colonial 1–2, 4–5, 7–10, 28–29, 31–41, 45–46, 50–51, 59–70, 71n3, 77–80, 84, 87–88, 94, 96, 101, 104, 110–114, 116–117, 119, 121, 124–125, 127–129, 131, 135–136, 138, 145–146, 148–151, 153, 157, 159, 166–167, 168n2, 169n3, 170n6, 172n10, 180–182, 184–188, 192–193 colonial legacies of affects 31 colonialism 2, 4–5, 24, 28, 34, 37, 62–63, 65, 80, 85, 89, 94, 98–100, 108, 115, 119, 128, 157, 169n3, 170n6, 180, 184, 193 coloniality of academic writing 165 colonization see histories colonizer see settler Coloured 126–127 commitment 3, 8, 15, 17, 19, 25, 33, 35, 77, 83, 85, 88, 113, 118, 128, 130, 152, 165 commodification 36 communities 32, 64, 79, 81, 83, 87–88, 93, 100–101, 104, 115, 117–118, 120, 139n9 community 2, 18–20, 25, 33, 49, 84, 87–88, 98, 102, 113–114, 117–118, 120, 150, 160, 187 complexity 16–17, 108, 116, 173n12 compliant 183 complicity 2, 33–35, 37, 39–40, 110, 116, 125, 128, 136, 138, 148, 158 condition 5, 16, 65, 81, 83, 172n9 conditions of arrival 15 confining 9 connections 80, 95, 114, 118, 120, 130, 191 conquest 8, 47, 185 consent 31, 112, 156 consequences 16, 19, 32, 38, 151–153, 161 contagion 20 containment 21, 40, 185, 191 contingent 15, 23, 153 control 8, 22, 29, 47, 55–56, 60–61, 63, 70, 78, 85–86, 99, 133, 145, 147, 156, 172n9, 173n11, 183–184 cooptation 9, 93–96 cost 22–23, 57, 60, 96, 119, 183 Coulthard 28, 31–32, 36, 62, 150 counter-­conduct 6, 30, 60–61

counter-­narrative 146, 150 Covid 18, 95, 180, 191 creative 9, 15, 24, 45, 87, 116, 131–132, 158, 168, 186, 190 criminal 124–125, 130 critical 5, 29, 32, 34–35, 48, 68, 81, 83–84, 86, 109–112, 117–118, 120, 130–131, 135, 147, 152, 155, 168, 186, 188 critique 6, 17, 23, 38, 47, 52, 57, 110, 112, 114, 116, 119, 128, 130, 138, 147, 150, 175n16, 189–190 crossword 165 cruel optimism see Sarah Ahmed culturally diverse learners 85 culturally responsive pedagogies 7–8, 77, 81–85, 88 culture 17, 22, 30–31, 53, 56, 71n2, 77, 79–80, 82, 84, 87–88, 95, 112, 124, 133, 149, 174n13, 182, 184, 187–188 curricular content 36 Da Silva 7, 81, 153 Datafication 78 death 8, 15, 22, 34, 38, 45, 59–61, 63–65, 67–70, 71n2, 101, 147, 155, 160, 161n3, 171, 181 decoloniality 10, 170n6; see also academy; possible; neoliberal decolonization see theory deficit narratives 8, 15 deficit teaching 9, 82, 86, 89 dehumanizing 4, 7, 80, 158 Deleuze 59–61, 66–67, 78, 164 departure 29, 34, 39 desire 4, 8, 17, 19–20, 22, 25, 29–34, 36–37, 39–41, 82, 116, 135, 146, 153, 156, 158, 185, 191 destruction 8, 22, 65, 129, 133–135, 139, 159, 161n3 determinacy 3, 134 devise 9 dialectic 3, 132, 139 differences 17, 102 differently 3, 6, 15–18, 22, 24, 26, 30, 34, 89, 109, 119, 121, 152–153, 180, 184, 187–188 diffractive see Barad, reading dignity 19, 64, 69 disadvantaged 126–127, 193 disappear 56, 95, 99, 110, 185

208  Index

discipline 5, 15–17, 50–51, 78, 81, 111, 133, 149 discomfort 23, 39, 99 discourse 29, 63, 80, 112, 128, 131, 155, 183 disinvesting 2, 8, 150 disorientation 8, 15, 17–19, 21 displacement 2, 58n2, 149, 157 dispossession 28, 34, 38–39, 101, 131, 149–150, 157–158, 186 dissensus 2 dissent 47, 70, 148 dissimulation 6 dissonance 5, 8, 15, 153, 190 diversity 19–20, 47, 57n1, 77, 83, 87–89, 109, 131 divestures 62, 71 docile 85, 88–89, 183; see also bodies domination 3, 8, 24, 31, 47, 168n1, 185 dying 8, 59, 63–64, 68–70, 145, 152, 154, 177n17 ecology see plastic social agents economic 3–4, 15, 17–18, 22, 50, 62, 68, 84, 89, 113, 118–119, 137, 149, 182, 184–185 education allegory 77, 81–82 educators 4–6, 29, 35–37, 39–41, 48, 66, 77–79, 111–113, 116, 121 efficiency 10, 184, 187 embodied histories 15 emotion 16, 24, 102 empire see seductive promises empowerment 102 empty promises 20, 35, 47 engagement 6, 9, 30, 35–36, 40, 47, 80, 83, 86, 88–89, 108, 112, 131–132, 139, 156, 165, 193–194 English 51, 53, 96, 121, 126, 167, 168n2, 173n11, 175n15, 175n16 Enlightenment 2, 4, 56, 128 entangled 18, 32, 125, 188 epistemic see praxis epistemological 1, 4, 6, 19, 47–48, 68, 71n3, 79, 82, 111, 128, 146, 155, 167, 171n8, 172n9, 173n12 equality 20, 36, 153 erotic see politics of anger escape 26, 32, 61, 99, 186 established 6–7, 113, 116, 128, 132, 158, 165

ethical 1–2, 4–5, 7, 40, 79, 88–89, 93, 104, 116, 146–147, 151, 153, 160 ethical praxis 156, 160, 164–177 ethics 1–2, 4, 6–7, 9, 38, 81, 104, 118, 145–148, 151–156, 158–160, 166, 171–174, 188 ethnic 3, 46, 53, 147 ethos 2, 28–29, 36–37, 39–40, 62, 112, 188, 193 etymological 165 Eurocentric 4, 80, 88, 111, 127–128, 184 Europe 2–4, 50, 52, 95, 111, 128, 148 Europeanness 50 excavation 2, 168n1 excellence 10, 135, 146 excess 9, 45, 133, 147, 155, 159–160 expansion see colonial experiences 16, 19, 31, 39, 46, 53, 78–80, 83, 88, 94, 109–110, 112–113, 154, 158, 191 experimentation 187, 189 explanation 3, 26, 109 exploitation 19, 34, 111, 114, 181, 185 extinction 68 extraction 2, 5, 22, 114, 157, 181, 192 faculty of color 24 failure 7, 38–39, 48, 70, 78, 82, 118–119, 128, 168n2, 183, 185 Fanon 61–62, 93, 104, 129, 150 fear see death feminist 2, 4–5, 38, 80, 93, 96, 100, 147–148, 152, 154, 167, 170n6, 172n9 Fitz-­Henry 66–67 food 122, 187, 203 footnotes 164–165 Foucault 6, 30, 59–61, 63, 71, 78, 93–95 freedom 4, 22, 31, 45, 95, 99, 134, 153, 155–156, 174n14, 175n16 frontier logic 5 fugitivity 2, 61, 70, 99, 104, 150, 160, 185 future 3–5, 7, 9, 15, 20, 37, 45–46, 55, 64, 67, 70–71, 97, 101, 116, 118, 121, 133, 145, 147, 150, 154, 156–157, 160, 181, 184, 186, 192 futurity 1, 5–6, 29, 36, 40, 98–99, 112, 116, 134, 156

Index  209

gender 3, 16, 56, 81, 108, 111, 139n9, 157, 159, 168n1, 170n6, 175n16 generations 117, 130, 202 generative 6, 29–30, 38, 46, 50, 71, 110, 118, 121, 134–135, 137, 184, 187 geographical 52, 126 geologic 7 geo-­political 2–3 Global South 3, 170n6 Going along 23, 25 gossiping 16 governance 39, 78, 94, 128, 157, 159, 183 governmentality 86, 94, 149 Grande 5, 16, 18, 24, 28, 33, 36, 38, 62, 109–110, 112, 115, 129–131 guilt 99, 125 happiness 21, 23–26, 188, 191 harm 16, 34–35, 37, 39, 110, 114, 138, 183 harmful 29, 33, 39, 62, 110–111, 119, 138, 145 Harney 2, 29, 37, 47, 61, 130, 136, 150, 153, 158–159, 185–186, 190, 192 Hartman 19, 150, 154–156 health 17, 19, 46, 159, 181, 188 Hegel 45, 139n5 hegemonic 3, 5, 16, 81, 114, 168n2, 186 hegemony 9, 28, 80–81, 88 HESA 108–114, 116–117, 121 heteronormative 156 heterosexist 46 higher education 1, 4–9, 15, 20, 22–23, 28–29, 33–37, 39–41, 51, 59–63, 66, 69–70, 71n3, 108–111, 113–118, 120–121, 125–128, 136–138, 139n3, 139n4, 145, 147, 150, 156–159, 165, 170n6, 180–185, 188, 193 high-­poverty see communities histories 1, 15–18, 25, 28, 40, 79–80, 87, 117, 173n11 hope 1, 3, 5, 20, 24, 33, 36, 40, 46, 116, 120, 138–139, 150, 170n6, 185 hopeful 29, 33, 36–37, 40, 121

human 22, 50–51, 56, 59, 62, 71n5, 79, 81–82, 94, 101, 118, 130–131, 135, 145–146, 149–150, 155, 157, 160, 172n9, 174n13, 182 humanist 7, 188 humility 39, 168 humor 61, 67, 70; see also Bhungalia identity see racial ideology see liberal ignorance 16, 21, 24, 55, 98 illegibility 16 imaginaries 6, 37 imagination 6, 8, 45, 139, 188, 192 immanent 60, 66, 68–69, 124, 136 immigrant 109, 113, 118 imperialism 62, 114 impersonal see capacity implicated 18, 69, 95, 110, 159 implication 9, 93–96, 150, 159 impossible 5, 20, 41, 45–46, 66, 70, 71n2, 117, 129–130, 147–148, 150, 155, 160, 161n3, 169n5 improvisation 159, 186–187, 189 inclusion 3, 15–16, 20, 23, 47, 78, 82–84, 87–88, 109, 131 inclusive 83, 111, 114, 125, 158, 160 incommensurable 15 Indian 3, 126–127 Indigenist Epistemology 80 Indigenous 2, 4–6, 8, 28–32, 34–40, 42, 61–67, 69–71, 77, 80–81, 87, 89–93, 96–97, 105, 108–109, 111–113, 118, 121, 123, 130–131, 136, 146–147, 149, 159, 170n6, 174n13, 175n16, 181, 185, 198, 202 Indigenous dispossession 31 Indigenous practices 31 Indigenous suicidology studies 64 individualism 78, 86, 112, 184, 191–192 see bounded indoctrination 81 inequality 5, 35, 85, 108, 110 inhabit 17–18, 139 inheritances 17, 184 inhuman 95, 154, 160 injustices 35, 40, 110, 125 innocence 98, 110, 128, 137–138, 151, 153 inscriptions 145 insistence 147, 153, 158, 164

210  Index

institution 8, 15, 17–18, 22, 24–25, 46–48, 51, 63, 70, 77–79, 93–95, 98–100, 102, 105, 109–112, 116–119, 121, 124, 126–127, 130, 136–139, 146, 157, 160, 161n1, 172n9, 182, 185, 187, 193 institutional spaces 16, 22, 98, 192 intention see refuse international 1, 4, 77, 96 interpersonal see refusal interpretive 3, 9, 125, 130; see also devise intersectional see relations intervention 9, 65, 68, 118, 168n1 invisibility 6, 26, 30, 78–79, 175n16, 166 Jagera 169n3, 174n13 joy 1, 25, 102, 172n10, 191 junior faculty 15–16, 18, 21, 23 knowledge 9, 15, 19, 21, 38, 40, 48–50, 55, 57n1, 63, 70, 77–80, 82, 84–88, 94, 98–99, 102, 104, 109, 112, 118, 120–121, 125, 127–128, 131, 135–139, 146, 149, 152–153, 158, 166, 169n5, 170n6, 171n8, 182, 186, 190–191 Kristeva 46–47 la paperson 2, 41 labor 15, 24–25, 111, 114 land 22, 31, 36, 39, 43, 49, 55, 71, 109, 118, 123, 138, 169n3, 169n5, 171n8, 181, 185, 198–200, 202–204 language 53, 87, 96, 109, 115, 121, 126, 149, 168n1, 168n2, 171n8, 173n12, 174n13, 175n16, 185, 189 Latinx 120 laziness 16 learning 19, 25, 38–39, 71, 77–79, 82–88, 96, 101, 110, 114, 117, 119, 121, 127, 136, 138, 169n5, 174n14, 182, 186 liberal 2, 16, 21, 30, 32, 35, 99–100, 154, 164, 186 liberation 99, 102, 104, 119 libidinal see disinvesting life 3, 6, 8, 22–23, 30, 34–36, 39, 48–50, 59–65, 68–69, 71n2, 77, 79, 83, 87, 94–95, 98–102, 104, 128,

131–132, 137, 145–147, 151, 154, 156–157, 160, 161n3, 165, 168, 171n7, 172n9, 175n15, 191 life-­and-­death 8 lifeworlds 2, 28, 66, 83 linear 9, 132, 137, 146–148, 160, 167, 194n1; see also progress linear temporality 9, 147, 160, 194n1; see also progress living 8, 22, 26, 31, 49, 57, 60–61, 65, 68–69, 102, 120, 135, 157, 159, 169n3, 172n9, 174n14, 188 local 1, 8–9, 55, 84, 87–88, 96, 111, 114, 147, 153, 157–158, 187, 192 logic 2, 9–10, 28, 36, 40, 48, 62, 64–65, 67, 77–80, 82, 84–85, 88, 114, 121, 132–133, 148, 167, 168n2, 175n16, 180–181, 183–188, 190, 193 Lorde 9, 93, 101–104 lost ghosts 26 Malabou 124, 129, 132–136 management 4, 36, 65, 78, 145, 183, 193 marginalization 5, 16, 93, 96, 104 market 5, 49, 180, 188, 193; see also principles Maroonage 100 mass growth 120 mastery 146 materiality 36, 65, 135 Mbembe 19, 36, 65, 68, 134–135 McGranahan 2, 6, 28–31, 33–34, 36, 61, 150 measures 20, 155 Mercer 169n5 merit 16; see also uncritical messianic 147, 150, 156, 160 methodology 40, 48, 58n3, 189 Mhor 175n15 micropolitics see affectively middle-­class 16, 18 misery see academy misogynistic 18 missionary/residential school 149 modes see refusal Mohawk 6, 30, 35 moral 3, 5, 46, 49, 57, 58n2, 99, 137, 149 Moten 2, 29, 37, 47, 61, 70, 99, 104, 130, 136, 150, 153, 158–159, 185–186, 190

Index  211

multicultural politics 30, 95 murder 38, 148; see also settler myth 99, 115 Nanni 149 narrative see rage, progress nationalism 54 Native 3, 8, 109, 113, 170n6 necropolitics 61, 64–65, 68 Negarestani 68–69 negation 5, 35, 95, 98, 103, 139 negotiation see ongoing neocolonial 35, 41, 124, 130, 184 neoliberal see economic newcomers 15–16, 18 non-­humans 146 non-­Indigenous 21, 39–40, 61, 87, 109, 170n6, 172n10 norms 16, 18, 21, 36, 82, 136, 165, 172n9 noumenal 7 objectivity 48, 58n3 occupy 3, 57, 98, 100 ongoing 1, 4, 9, 15–18, 34–35, 39, 101, 110, 119, 121, 146, 191 onticide 63 onto-­epistemologies see survival ontological 1, 4, 6, 31, 81, 133, 135, 146 opacity 104, 155, 160 opposition 6, 30, 63, 100, 104, 148 oppression 22, 24, 31, 77, 131, 135, 172n9, 174n14 optimism 1, 5, 20, 39 oral see histories ordinary affects 49 Orientalism 2, 50–51 orientations 8, 16–18, 22–23, 81 oriented 17–18, 31, 36, 64, 111, 171n8, 184 Other 3, 48, 50, 104, 127, 148, 169n5 otherwise 5–6, 16, 58n2, 65, 99, 110, 113, 147–148, 150, 183, 185, 192, 174n13, 174n14 pain see anger pandemic 17–19, 111, 121, 191 partial deaths 8, 59–60, 62, 65–70 participate 9, 25, 192 passive force of curiosity 8, 45

past 9, 32, 40, 46, 48, 55, 57, 79–80, 102, 112, 127, 145, 147, 150, 154, 156, 158, 160, 166, 168n2, 170n6, 172n10, 174n13, 175n16, 181, 194n1 paths 146, 160, 185, 200, 204 patriarchal 145, 159, 169n5, 175n15, 175n16 Patton 5, 108, 111–112 paying attention see roots, words pedagogical 7, 9, 28, 33–35, 37–39, 80, 82–84, 86, 88, 148, 152, 157 pedagogy 18, 40, 48, 63, 77–78, 80–84, 88, 145, 147, 152, 191 performative 19, 24, 46, 78 perspectives xvi, 2, 16, 109, 136, 152, 184 Petro rites 58n2 phenomenological see experience philosophy 5, 132–133, 136, 151, 169n5, 190–191 plantation 99–100, 104, 149 plants 181, 199, 202 plastic refusals 9, 125, 129, 136, 138–139 plasticity 124, 129, 132–136, 139 see Malabou, Hegel plastic social agents 129 Plato 81, 169n5 pleasure 20, 32, 187, 191 plurality of knowledge 85, 87 point of view 47 policy 1, 8–9, 16, 77, 81–82, 88, 100, 113–114, 120, 126, 128, 152, 159, 184, 187 political 1–8, 15, 17, 19, 22, 24–25, 28–35, 39, 48, 50, 52, 59–70, 71n6, 79, 81, 84, 86, 93, 95, 98–104, 111–112, 114–115, 119, 121, 128, 134, 136, 154–156, 172n9, 173n12, 182, 185, 191, 193 politico-­affective 6 politics of anger 9 positionality 1, 6–7, 39, 108, 121, 125, 148, 152 possible 7–8, 16, 20, 36–37, 45, 52, 57, 102, 104, 112, 114, 116, 121, 124, 134–136, 145–147, 150, 154, 158, 160, 161n2, 161n3, 172n9, 172n10, 174n14, 175n16, 185, 187, 191–192, 194

212  Index

possibles 4, 6, 147, 153, 155, 158, 160, 161n2 postcolonial see schools post-­race 95 poststructuralist 190, 168n1 potential 7, 9, 22, 24–25, 34, 36–38, 40–41, 66, 70, 87, 124–125, 133, 136, 139, 156, 173n12, 187–188, 192 see plasticity power 6, 8, 21–22, 29–32, 34–35, 39–41, 46, 49, 61–63, 65–68, 70, 78, 80, 82–86, 89, 94–95, 98, 102–104, 108, 114, 119, 133, 136, 147, 156–158, 160, 168n2, 169n5, 170n6, 171n8, 172n10, 175n16; see also colonial practice 2, 4–5, 8–10, 17, 29–34, 36–40, 49, 57n1, 60–61, 63, 65–68, 70, 77–86, 88, 100, 108, 114, 117, 121, 124, 135, 152, 155, 157, 160, 165, 169n5, 180–182, 184, 186–193 pragmatic 7, 151, 158 praxis 1–2, 6–7, 9–10, 23–24, 28, 31, 61–62, 65, 68, 70, 80, 108, 112, 121, 129, 147, 150–151, 160 precarious 93 present 15–16, 20, 23, 32, 35, 45, 67, 101, 112, 114, 116–117, 128, 130, 134–135, 138–139, 148, 150, 154, 156–160, 168n2, 170n6, 174n13, 176n17, 181–182 principles 4, 10, 83, 146, 153 process 3, 8, 57, 78, 97, 102, 113, 115–117, 119, 127, 129, 132, 134–137, 147, 157, 172n9, 174n14, 188–189, 191 productive 34, 64, 67, 83, 132, 137–139, 139n3, 152, 159, 186, 192 professional 9, 16, 18, 25, 57n1, 83, 87, 89, 108, 114, 152, 161n5, 181 professional development 9, 83, 87, 89 professionalization 9, 147 progress 5, 21, 57, 101–102, 137, 139n9, 157, 165, 184, 186, 190; see also colonial progressive 7, 46, 57, 149–150, 153 proper 6–7, 65, 132, 147, 152–154 protagonist 45, 47, 49, 51, 53–55, 57 protestant see White, settler

public 5–6, 21–23, 40, 63, 77, 82, 87, 95, 100, 105, 110, 112–114, 126–127, 182, 185 publishing 36, 183 queer 3 queerphobic 18 quotidian refusals 60, 69–70 race 3, 16, 45–46, 48, 50, 53, 55, 80, 94–95, 99–100, 104–105, 125–126, 139n9, 147, 159, 167, 168n1, 171n7, 174n14, 176 racial 6, 18–19, 21, 24, 46, 53–54, 61, 81, 94–96, 98–102, 104, 113–114, 124, 127, 130, 148, 152–154, 160, 175n16 racial contract 98, 104 racism 3, 5, 9, 16, 24, 53–55, 62, 69, 77, 89, 93–96, 98–104, 108, 114, 125, 147, 169n5, 175n16 racist 9, 54–57, 62, 93–98, 100–101 radical 4, 9, 31, 35–36, 57, 60, 67, 71n2, 84, 99, 102, 112, 115, 119, 121, 124–125, 129–131, 134–136, 138–139, 152, 168, 170n6, 172n9, 185–186 radical openness 134–135 rage 26, 58, 79 reading 7, 9, 25, 56, 61, 77, 115, 130, 133, 145, 147, 152, 155, 165, 168n1, 174n13, 180–181, 188–193, 197; see also slow recognition see liberal reconciliation 23, 31, 40, 160 reform 8, 59–60, 69–70, 81–82, 84, 87–88, 115, 117, 127 refusal 1–10, 15–19, 21–25, 28–41, 45–48, 52, 54, 57, 59–71, 75, 77, 79–83, 85–88, 93, 98–101, 103–105, 108, 112, 115–117, 124–125, 128–130, 134, 136–139, 143, 145–149, 152, 154, 156, 158–160, 161n4, 165–166, 180–184, 186–192, 198 refuse 1, 5, 7–8, 16–17, 19, 21–23, 26, 29, 34–37, 40, 46–47, 56, 60, 67, 70, 79, 86, 96, 100–104, 112, 130, 133, 148, 158–159, 165, 168n2, 180, 186–189, 191–192, 194 regimes of knowing 4, 7 relating 1, 29, 150, 176

Index  213

relations 2, 4, 6–8, 22, 28–32, 34–40, 49, 57, 62, 65, 67, 71, 80, 84, 95, 112, 114, 148, 156, 160, 172n10, 193, 198–199, 201, 203; see also colonial re-­memorialization 9, 147 reparations 100, 117 repetition 9, 26, 119, 147, 150, 156–157, 165 representation 49, 51–52, 71n2, 104 resistance 2–3, 6, 18, 21, 23–24, 29–30, 33–34, 37–38, 59, 66, 69–70, 80–81, 93, 97, 99–100, 104, 109, 112–113, 129–130, 147, 152–154, 158, 160, 161n5, 165, 185, 191 resource 60, 66, 102, 116, 192 resources 3, 23, 39, 66, 68–69, 83, 114, 117–118, 121n1, 181–182, 184–185, 187, 192 respectability 185 response 5, 19–22, 55–56, 65, 98, 101, 147–148, 151–152, 154, 169n4, 172n9, 172n10, 173n12, 175n16, 180, 184, 190 responsibility 7, 18–19, 78–79, 117, 119–120, 125, 128, 136, 147, 152, 158, 160, 185, 188 responsive 7–8, 77, 81–89 revenge 35 revolutionary 3, 119, 185, 192, 172n9 rhetoric 17, 20–21, 25, 81, 95, 118, 186 riches xiii rights 24, 31, 34, 51, 56, 80, 85, 95, 111, 130–131, 146, 154, 158, 160, 182, 174n13 risk 35, 46, 68–69, 71, 88–89, 119, 151 roots 4, 111, 114, 116, 128, 169n5, 172n9, 173n11, 168, 193; see also etymological rules of engagement see Bhungalia safety 114, 120 Said 50, 52 Sandy Grande 24 Sara Ahmed 8, 18, 21, 173n11 savage 46, 50, 52, 57 Savage pedagogue 48 Savage slot 45–46, 48–53, 57 schooling success 79

schools 5, 9, 77, 80–81, 85–86, 88–89, 111, 115, 119, 149 security 116, 119, 129 seductive see desires, power seductive promises 40–41 self 9, 21, 24, 26, 31, 37, 49, 59–61, 63–64, 66, 68, 81–82, 84, 86–87, 99, 101, 103, 105, 129–130, 133, 135–139, 147, 153–154, 156, 158–159, 167, 172n9, 172n10, 174n13, 184, 186, 188, 191–192, 194 self-­defense 101 self-­immolation 59–61, 63–64, 66, 68 Self-­immolations 64–65 self-­love 101 self-­preservation 9, 147 sensibilities 67, 95, 147, 152, 160, 180, 191 sentimentality 147, 150, 152–153 servitude see colonial settler ix, x, xiii, 2–3, 5–6, 8, 28, 30–31, 33, 37–39, 43, 65, 77–80, 84, 86–87, 94, 96, 98–99, 105, 109, 111, 115, 122–123, 131, 145, 147–148, 150–153, 156–158, 163, 166–167, 168n2, 169n3, 175n15, 175n16, 185, 188, 193, 201, 204 settler students 39 sex 3, 94, 168n1, 169n5 silence 2, 21, 36, 61, 66–67, 70, 93–95, 98–104; see also racist silencing 9, 77, 83, 93–95, 99–100, 102–104 Simpson 2, 6, 28, 30–31, 33–34, 62, 81, 120, 150, 185 skepticism 120 skills 19, 77, 82–83, 86, 95–96, 118, 167, 182 slave ship 155, 200 Slovenia 2, 46, 49–51, 53 slow 7, 65–66, 69, 118, 127, 172n9 Slow reading 10, 180–181, 187–194 Slow scholarship 10, 180, 187–188 social change 6, 37, 39, 112, 136 social hierarchy 16 social justice 1, 18–19, 25, 32, 34, 38, 46, 85, 108, 110, 124–125, 137, 188 sociocultural 19, 22 solidarities 8, 17, 33–34, 37–38, 40, 101–102, 104, 130, 136

214  Index

South African 124–128, 131, 136–139, 181; see also higher education sovereignty 30, 64–65, 77, 80–81, 131, 173n11, 175n15 speculative 6, 61, 68, 70, 147, 151, 154, 158, 188 standardisation 36, 89 status quo 8, 21, 46, 66, 171, 176 Stein 4–5, 8–9, 29, 33, 39, 108, 110, 112, 124, 128, 137–138 Stengers 151 Stewart 49, 57, 118, 169, 171, 177 stolen land 61 stories xii, 40, 47, 53, 118, 199 strangers 15–16, 18, 25, 47 strategies 4, 78, 87, 94–95, 104, 129, 166, 183–184 stratified 6 structural misery 64 structure see colonial struggle see sociocultural student affairs 9, 108, 111–112, 115, 120 students 4–5, 15–16, 18–22, 25, 29, 34–41, 46, 48, 51, 53, 55–56, 77–86, 88–89, 96, 108, 110–116, 118, 126–128, 153, 169, 182–183, 185, 189, 192–193 subjectivities 16, 25, 61–62, 85–86, 88 subjugated 1, 30, 63, 66–67, 158, 185 successes 119 suffering 1, 21, 101–104, 136, 160, 172 suicide 60, 63–65, 69, 71 surveillance 16, 24–25, 61, 78, 114, 159, 182, 184, 192 survival 15–16, 19, 94, 102, 185 suspicion 98 synthesis 85–86, 139 system 16, 20, 35–36, 53, 77, 82, 88, 95, 108–111, 114, 117, 126–129, 132, 153, 157, 181–185, 192–193 systemic see violence T Min-­ha 48 tactic 59, 61, 70 taken-­for-­granted 7, 16–17, 152, 180, 191 teaching 15, 25, 27, 37–39, 47–48, 56, 77, 82, 84–89, 97, 114, 139, 145, 158, 167, 170, 183 Technikons 126–127

technology 5, 70, 126–128, 133, 146, 172 teleological 147, 150, 153 temporal scales 156 temporality see ethical temporalizing see Archive, ethics tension 15, 17, 23, 80, 84, 153, 158, 186 tenure 17, 23, 115, 184 tenure track 115 terms 2–3, 5, 7–8, 15, 22, 39–40, 49–51, 53, 60, 78, 86, 101, 104, 109, 118, 120–121, 127, 129, 133–136, 153, 158, 174, 184–185 text 109, 165, 168, 174, 176, 188–189, 191–192 thanatologies 63 The Undercommons 47 thematique 48–50, 52 theorizing 1, 5, 23, 29, 32, 52, 100, 145, 174 theory 5, 32, 35, 53, 56, 62, 64, 80–81, 115, 130–131, 165, 170, 182, 190; see also refusal thinking 22, 25, 50, 54, 57, 61, 80, 83–84, 88, 114–115, 125, 131–133, 135, 138, 148–152, 155–156, 167, 170, 176, 184, 191 time 16–17, 19, 22, 25–26, 39, 45–46, 54, 60, 68–69, 71, 102, 109, 113–117, 119, 121, 132, 146–150, 155, 157–159, 169–173, 175–176, 182–183, 188, 192–194 Tkaronto 199, 201–203 Todorova 52 transdisciplinary 132–133, 187, 192 transformation 9, 31, 33, 40, 56, 80, 83–84, 89, 101–103, 124, 127–129, 131–132, 134, 136–137, 139–140 trespassing see ethical praxis trouble 23, 153 Trouillot 46–51, 57 Trump presidency 18 Tuck and Yang 1, 37, 62 Turrbal 174 UK 93–96 unanticipated 15 uncertainty 45 uncritical 16 undoing see self unhappiness 24

Index  215

unimagined 4, 15, 160 United States 9, 20, 54, 58, 109, 183; see also student affairs university 2, 4–8, 15–21, 23, 33–41, 47–49, 51, 53, 55, 57, 59, 61–63, 69–70, 74–75, 84, 96, 98–99, 108–109, 111–121, 124–125, 128–132, 136–140, 146, 150, 157, 180, 182–183, 186–188, 192–193, 201; see also colonial; historical; settler; Western useful 16–17, 19, 22, 50, 80, 86, 97, 132, 173, 193 violence 5, 8–10, 18–20, 29, 31–32, 34–35, 37–38, 52, 58–59, 61, 64–65, 67–68, 78, 97–98, 103, 105, 108, 110, 114–115, 120–121, 145, 147, 149–151, 153, 155–157, 172–173, 182, 186 vivacide 8, 59–60, 63, 66, 68–69 voices 17, 36, 45–46, 54, 56, 78, 84, 87, 114, 168, 174 vulnerable 18, 93 weaponized see refusal wealth 114–115 Weil 172 Western 4–5, 47, 52, 57, 63–65, 71, 111, 146–147, 149, 167, 174; see also university; identity White 1–3, 45, 51–52, 61–62, 69, 99, 126, 147–150, 159, 161, 170, 175 White fragility 99 white modernity 9, 156 white privilege 95, 99 white supremacist 18, 20, 22, 95, 100, 103, 111, 172

white woman 17 whiteness 46, 50, 52–53, 56, 80, 176, 193 willful 29, 33, 36–37, 40, 55, 65, 94, 174 witness 9, 173 Woolf 173, 175 words 5, 31, 33, 36–38, 46, 48, 54, 56, 60, 64, 68–71, 82, 86, 96, 101, 111, 154, 157–158, 164–165, 167, 170–175, 190 work 2, 8, 17–18, 20, 24–26, 29, 33–34, 39, 41, 47, 49, 51, 54, 59, 62, 66–67, 69, 77–79, 82, 85–86, 94–95, 100, 102, 104, 108–111, 113–114, 116–117, 120, 125, 127, 129–132, 136–137, 149–152, 167–170, 172–173, 175, 182, 184, 186, 189–191, 193 world 3–4, 53–54, 56, 64, 69, 71, 77, 79, 86–88, 95, 98–99, 104, 118, 120, 129–130, 134–135, 137, 145, 147–149, 154, 156, 158–161, 166, 168–170, 172, 175, 180, 187 writing 7, 9, 16, 69, 77, 101, 109, 125, 133, 137–139, 145, 147–148, 152, 155–156, 164–165, 167–170, 172–175, 185, 191–192; see also academic xʷməθkʷəy̓əm First Nation 160 Yagera 174 Yanyuwa 169, 174 Yugoslavia 3 zombie 21–22, 26