Refusal

To refuse is to say no. But, no, it is not just that. To refuse can be generative and strategic, a deliberate move toward one thing, belief, practice, or community and away from another. Refusals illuminate limits and possibilities, especially but not only of the state and other institutions. And yet, refusal cannot be cast merely as a response to authority, or an updated version of resistance, or a concept to subsume under already existing scholarly categories. Instead, the contributors to this Openings collection find refusal to be about the social as much as the political, to be a concept in dialogue with exchange and equality. In The Gift, Marcel Mauss (1967) discusses refusal as the cutting of social relations, or in some instances as the raising anew of obligations and rituals. We seek to theorize refusal in this collection as concept to both think with and think about. We approach refusal as ethnographic subject and mode, recognizing each as making its own set of moral claims, including claims about how we receive, make sense of, and present (or not) ethnographic worlds. Yet why the concept of refusal now? Why not just use the term resistance (see Theodossopoulos 2014)? A quarter of a century ago, Lila Abu-Lughod (1990,

How do contemporary subjects navigate, withstand and even contest the particular governmental assemblages that define regimes of power today? The article addresses this question by considering 'refusal', which has emerged as an increasingly potent empirico-theoretical anthropological concept by, in part, marking an explicit contrast with the longer-standing concept of 'resistance'. Through analysis of resistance and refusal literatures, and with reference to fieldwork with Burmese grassroots activists and Rohingya civil society actors, the article delineates resistance and refusal as divergent but intertwined tools for engaging different aspects of any given apparatus of power. Where resistance describes opposition to direct domination (sovereign modes of power, following Foucault's schema), refusal describes the disavowals, rejections and manoeuvrings with and away from diffuse and mediated forms of power (governmentality). To the extent that contemporary apparatuses of power typically constitute a hybrid assemblage of sovereign and governmental forces, subjects of population groups draw upon both resistance and refusal tactics in their navigations of these apparatuses, navigations that refigure the collective resisting/refusing subject. Resistance and refusal hence operate in a quasi-dialectical relation, meaning that through a play of recursivity between apparent converse strategies (direct confrontation versus evasion) groups come to fortify stronger positions from which they can persist. Resistance and refusal not only constitute the conditions of each other's possibility , sharpening the particular interventions that each makes, but demonstrate the necessity of a politics of manoeuvre in which subjects—as individuals and part of collective groups—oscillate between direct confrontation and governmental navigation

"Research is a dirty word among many Native communities (Tuhiwai Smith, 1999), and arguably, also among ghettoized (Kelley, 1997), Orientalized (Said, 1978), and other communities of overstudied Others. The ethical standards of the academic industrial complex are a recent development, and like so many post–civil rights reforms, do not always do enough to ensure that social science research is deeply ethical, meaningful, or useful for the individual or community being researched. Social science often works to collect stories of pain and humiliation in the lives of those being researched for commodification. However, these same stories of pain and humiliation are part of the collective wisdom that often informs the writings of researchers who attempt to position their intellectual work as decolonization. Indeed, to refute the crime, we may need to name it. How do we learn from and respect the wisdom and desires in the stories that we (over)hear, while refusing to portray/betray them to the spectacle of the settler colonial gaze? How do we develop an ethics for research that differentiates between power—which deserves a denuding, indeed petrifying scrutiny—and people? At the same time, as fraught as research is in its complicity with power, it is one of the last places for legitimated inquiry. It is at least still a space that proclaims to care about curiosity. In this essay, we theorize refusal not just as a “no,” but as a type of investigation into “what you need to know and what I refuse to write in” (Simpson, 2007, p. 72). Therefore, we present a refusal to do research, or a refusal within research, as a way of thinking about humanizing researchers.

We have organized this chapter into four portions. In the first three sections, we lay out three axioms of social science research. Following the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1990), we use the exposition of these axioms to articulate otherwise implicit, methodological, definitional, self-evident groundings (p. 12) of our arguments and observations of refusal. The axioms are: (I) The subaltern can speak, but is only invited to speak her/our pain; (II) there are some forms of knowledge that the academy doesn’t deserve; and (III) research may not be the intervention that is needed. We realize that these axioms may not appear self-evident to everyone, yet asserting them as apparent allows us to proceed toward the often unquestioned limits of research. Indeed, “in dealing with an open-secret structure, it’s only by being shameless about risking the obvious that we happen into the vicinity of the transformative” (Sedgwick, 1990, p. 22). In the fourth section of the chapter, we theorize refusal in earnest, exploring ideas that are still forming."

This paper offers a critical history of the self-proclaimed "Art Strike" as a political tactic, artistic performance, social practice, and philosophical exercise. Artists discussed include Robert Morris, Lee Lozano, Gustav Metzger, Goran Djordjevic, Stewart Home, and Claire Fontaine. Surveys a history of artists going on strike and their shifting political, and artistic, orientations.

In 1960, two years prior to the Algerian nation achieving independence from the French colonial rule, a photographer in the French army, Marc Garanger, aided the colonial officials in carrying out an Indigenous identity card program. During a period of only ten days, Garanger, accompanied by officers armed with machine guns, photographed over 2000 women native to the region of Kabylie. These women were seized from their dwellings, forced to line up on the street, and documented, before subsequently being sent off to concentration camps. Garanger, in the following year, smuggled the negatives in his possession into Switzerland where these images were published in a popular culture magazine L’Illustré suisse. The photographs in question continue to be celebrated as a testament to the ravages of war. This paper, however, aims to complicate Garanger’s work and argues against the notion of the photographer as a passive witness; it instead treats the photographer as an active participant in the act of dehumanization.

Furthermore, this text draws on the impossibility of the English language in enunciating collective grief and anguish, whilst aiming to create a method of writing about the unwritable towards a reclamation of humanity. Although Garanger's work is referenced throughout, following Saidiya Hartman’s footsteps, this paper refuses to reproduce his photographs; it instead strives to generate a method for writing that will confront the scholastic processes that sometimes play an unsuspecting, at others a complicit role in the normalization and casualization of violent encounters. The result, therefore, is a method presented in two acts: an experiment in process, poetry, and lamentation.

F*ck May 68, Fight Now: Exploring the Uses of the Radical Past from 1968 to Today

Session 1: History is a Weapon

June 8, 2018

Department of History, University of Liverpool

https://archive.discoversociety.org/2018/09/04/circumnavigating-the-past-foreclosing-the-future-commemoration-of-the-radical-past-in-the-amnesiac-present/

This study is an attempt to investigate English and Persian university students " behaviors in refusing the invitation. To this end, 60 participants (30 English and 30 Persian speakers) took part in the study. They were administered an open ended questionnaire in the form of discourse completion task (DCT) in which they had to refuse the invitation of interlocutor. The findings were then analyzed according to taxonomy of refusal strategies proposed by Beebe, Takahashi and Uliss-Weltz " s (1990). The findings showed that the participants of the two groups tended to employ indirect strategies more than direct ones in refusing the invitation of interlocutors. Moreover, reason, regret and appreciation were the most frequently used strategies by both English and Persian native speakers. Overall, the results of the study revealed that cross-cultural communication between English and Persian native speakers in refusal to invitations is not problematic as there are more similarities than differences between these two groups in using the refusal strategies. It is hoped that this study could add to the body of knowledge about pragmatic behaviors in general and refusal to invitation in particular.

Blanchot’s career famously shifted from essay writing for far-right journals to opposing the Algerian war and promoting the May ’68 revolts. For some, Blanchot’s “intellectual romance with fascism” is irredeemable (Sanos, 2013; Wolin, 2004). For others, his philosophy and literature points towards the irreducible possibility of community (Hill, 2018; Large, 2004).

What I am interested in here is less in picking a side, and more in asking how one concept of his – that of refusal – was remarkably able to bind his pre and post 1940 periods together, and which shifting orientation towards that concept marks his transition. I do so with the aim of contributing to questions of affirmation and negation in contemporary geographical thought. My aim is ultimately not to deny the concept's (dangerous) significance, but to explore what it might tell us about the possibility of refusal as an ethical responsibility.

The speech act of refusal is an area that has been considered by a variety of researchers. However, to date a specific comparison of native speakers of British English (NS) with nonnative (NNS) Saudi speakers has not been undertaken. This study fills this gap by exploring the similarities and differences in the refusal strategies of British English (NS) and (NNS) Saudis studying in the United Kingdom (UK). For the study, 33 subjects were asked to respond to 10 different scenarios, where they were required to carry out the speech act of refusal, allowing for data collection through a Discourse Completion Test. The resultant data was analysed in terms of semantic formulas and categorised according to the Beebe et al's (1990) refusal taxonomy. The results suggested differences between the two groups in refusal performance. Regret or saying "sorry", accompanied by excuses and explanations were the preferred formula for refusal in both groups, although direct refusal strategies were also relied on by the two groups. This suggests a basis for the application of Brown and Levinson's, (1987), politeness model in terms of universality. The choice of direct refusals for the NNS Saudi's also suggests the influence of British culture in respondents' realizations of refusals in English. From the research, it is suggested that refusal strategies and patterns are greatly influenced by native language and that the amount of time spent by NNS Saudis in the UK has an impact on their refusal strategies. The impact of this is that in order for NNS to develop appropriate pragmatic ability there is a need to recognize the influence of native language on refusal strategies in a second language as well as the experience of speaking with NS speakers. Further work is thus needed to understand the levels of impact of these two areas.

Scholars of resistance have long identified and differentiated the distinctive features, contours, and boundaries of resistance in social life. However, some have characterised the resulting plurality of conceptual frameworks in resistance studies as ‘somewhat chaotic’ (Baaz et al. 2016: 137). In this Intervention, we play within the chaos at the conceptual margins of resistance within political geography. We revisit Cindi Katz’s (2004) influential articulations of resistance, reworking, resilience, and revanchism 15 years after the publication of Growing Up Global. Considering the last decade and a half of socio-political, economic, colonial and environmental violence encountered by human and non-human life, we explore the ways in which Katz's work remains relevant to the issues and debates central to political geography.

Professionalism in communication is a matter of concern for speakers of all languages. Awareness about some features such as face-threatening property of refusal speech acts leads language users to apply some specific linguistic forms. Considering the significance of cultural and social variations in performing refusal speech acts and the importance of preserving "face", this study tried to find differences between native-Persian and English speakers. To collect the data, 60 native Persian and English speakers were asked to complete a two-phase questionnaire, a discourse completions test (DCT) and a self-report, including four different situations and Beebe's classification of refusals, was used. Great tendency toward using indirect forms between both Persian and English participants was taken as an indicator of noticeable consideration of face-preserving in refusals, although Persian speakers seemed more concerned about it. The differences between two groups of participants were inferred as cultural variations' reflection. Some implications for language teaching were discussed.

Artificial Intelligence and machine learning systems perform mechanisms of settler colonial violence by re-presenting Indigenous peoples as reconstituted images. Style transfer and GAN are two different machine learning models that provide results as restructured outcomes.  By marking the presence of an Indigenous person once again through a racialized technological framework, the output image is violated accordingly. Here, the white gaze situates itself by marking another moment of violence as it presents the colonial subject, i.e. the Indigenous person.  This article examines refusal as a mechanism of survival for Indigenous peoples by showcasing the results when using style transfer and GAN albeit employing Indigenous descriptors. The example provided is only to serve as such, not to compare to and recenter whiteness once more, but to display the distortion that occurs when using machine learning models in addition to the white gaze at its foundation. Thereafter, the article serves as an introductory exploration of settler colonial domination as expanded to machine learning models which requires a long-term investigation of refusal for Indigenous survival which I aim to present in more extensive work following this publication.

Article based on paper presented as part of Panel 24: ‘Looting, Refusing, Negating, Embodying’ ‘Critical Refusals’ Fourth Biennal Conference of the International Herbert Marcuse Society, University of Pennsylvania, 27-29th October 2011

http://www.pdcnet.org/radphilrev/content/radphilrev_2013_0016_0001_0375_0385

http://web.asc.upenn.edu/news/Critical_Refusals_Conference.pdf

Edited version of published paper presented at 'Is Black and Red Dead?' Conference, Centre for the Study of Social and Global and Justice (CSSGJ) University of Nottingham, 7-8 September, 2009

https://socialhistoryportal.org/news/articles/110943

The artist Cady Noland has made no new work essentially since 2001, and has turned instead to policing the circulation of her existing works in the market. This essay analyses  Noland’s recent legal activities, in which she has mobilised the law, primarily via the Visual Artists Right Act, to prevent the circulation of works that she considers to have been improperly maintained. Noland has withdrawn her authorship and her works’ status as art, and has created financial risk for collectors. In so doing, Noland has performed (or refused to perform) the labour of art in a way that can be understood in relation to refusals by a range of other artists, including Adrian Piper and Tehching Hsieh, and in terms provided by Giorgio Agamben’s reading of Melville’s Bartleby, the scrivener. Noland’s refusals, seen as an extension of artistic practice, open onto philosophical potentiality, and the possibility of art and artist being revalued in ways that disturb their current situation under the sign of the commodity.

Cooking is mind, body, spirit work. What’s possible when we ‘drop in’ to our bodies when cooking? We begin noticing what we are energetically bringing to the food we make. This creative project practices a pedagogy that works with food to create healing space. Healing, as it is defined here, is not void of discomfort nor is it happiness all the time. Who haunts your domestic space? Who is at your back when you cook? This project finds information and sacred knowledge in the food we cook and eat; it reflects back to us deeply buried truths regarding our traumas, joys, and subjectivity. This pedagogy holds the potential for participants to bring “new meanings” to food, and thereby, be activated as cultural producers cooking up the next chapter in our peoples’ creation stories (Anzaldúa 103). This project is documented as an auto-ethnographic tale from the perspective of the practitioner, using erotic storytelling to keep fire in the pages and a methodology of refusal to “determine the length of the [academy’s] gaze” (Tuck and Ree 640).

This paper investigates the speech act of refusal taking as a case study British responses to a salesperson's offer through the study of recordings of 109 conversations between the salesperson and a potential British customer. The data are analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively with the aim of finding the most frequent responses that denote refusal by the English native speakers. Most of the expressions used to reflect the British people's annoyance with the use of cold calls, the majority being brief phrases of refusal. In addition to the recorded calls, two questionnaires were conducted in Britain to shed light on the frequent expressions used on the phone in response to the salesperson. It is interesting here to catalog the range of strategies used by individuals, most of the time verbal, to avoid talking to the salesperson. These strategies seem to exist on a continuum of directness-indirectness. Firstly to perform an act of refusal efficient enough to end the call. Secondly to make the balance between the impacts of refusal per se and the keeping up with the social convention of mutual cooperation presented in the theory of politeness.

The present study is an attempt to investigate the relationship between language proficiency and
pragmatic comprehension of the refusal speech act among Iranian EFL learners. To this end, the
Oxford Placement Test (OPT), as a proficiency test, was given to participants and they were
divided into high and low level groups based on their proficiency scores. Then, a multiple-choice
discourse completion task (MDCT) was given to both groups to elicit their pragmatic knowledge.
The findings indicated that there was no significant difference between high and low groups in
pragmatic comprehension. In other words, language proficiency was not the determining factor
in the degree of pragmatic comprehension. Moreover, the results indicated that there was no
correlation between learners’ language proficiency and pragmatic knowledge. Therefore, in order
to have pragmatically competent EFL learners, they should be taught pragmatic functions and
language norms of the target language in the language classrooms.
Keywords: Pragmatic comprehension, Speech acts, Refusal speech act, MDCT

The speech act of refusal as a representative of the speech acts used by speakers which vary from culture to culture expressed directly or indirectly functions as a response to an initiating act by which a speaker fails to engage in a proposed action. This paper investigated the refusal features employed by students in English of JRMSU Dapitan, SY 2017-2018 utilizing Discourse Completion Tasks performed thru a closed role play.

Students employed indirect refusal strategies with long pauses which suggest respect and politeness more frequently when refusing to interlocutors with higher status which suggest that status affects the strategy choice. Such gesture signals harmless conversation to appear more polite and respectful.  This strategy is used by Filipinos who strive the word “no” with body language and facial expressions matching low intonation to avoid an unwelcome situation.  Refusals consisted of expressions “No” or “I can’t”, or “I won’t”, negative syntactic forms  interpreted as  statements of  unwillingness  and  inability are used  to interlocutors with  equal status  which calls for  awareness to  appropriate speech behavior  to communicate effectively , hence another study may be conducted on  language exposure  as contributory to the variation of refusal strategy used  to obtain a more comprehensive picture of refusal manifests.

The article aims to demonstrate a consistent methodology for conducting research of verbal communication behavior and identification of its peculiarities in different language cultures. The basic unit of communication crucial for the analysis of communicative behavior is called speech behavior pattern (SPB). The SPB analysis includes the following major factors to be concerned with: definition of illocutionary purpose of the SPB in terms of Natural Semantic Metalanguage, description of basic grammatical constructions belonging to SBP and identification of communicative-pragmatic factors important for choice of a specific utterance. Utterances that constitute a certain SBP are organized into a field with a prototypical center and a gradually formed periphery, referred to as communicative-pragmatic field (CPF). The practical implementation of this methodology consists in describing peculiarities of the speech behavior patterns of AGREEMENT and REFUSAL in the German discourse. The language data are taken from the existing German corpora.

In response to the provocation of this special issue, about the extent to which we might be ‘beyond recognition’ out of concern for its colonising tendencies, this paper enquires into norms of recognition in international development. The paper establishes development as a site in which governmentality operates (following Tania Murray Li), in which coloniality is at play, and which also forms a field of recognition. I provide an analysis of a land-based recognition claim by the minority ethnic Nubians in Kenya, and the non-recognition of this claim by the Kenya Slum Upgrading Project. The paper identifies three particular explanations for this non-recognition, all of which exhibit coloniality: the epistemic context, the programmatic nature of the development, and hierarchies of personnel. Together, these phenomena precluded the project from engaging in the difficult but necessary discussion around the Nubians’ claim because it was too political. The paper concludes that though we have cause to be concerned about the effects of coloniality on recognition regimes partly constituted by international development, international development has its limits in the milieu in which it operates, and political subjects can and do turn away from it to engage other, albeit imbricated, fields of recognition.

The National Korean American Services and Education Consortium (NAKASEC) is becoming an increasingly influential player in national immigrant justice worlds. This article traces NAKASEC’s evolving cri- tique of legal recognition as the primary goal of immigrant justice work. Following organizers though a 22-day vigil at the White House, a 1700-mile bike tour, and the creation of a housing collective exclu- sively for illegalized people, I argue that NAKASEC’s call to “re-define what we mean by winning” speaks to an emergent conceptualization of citizenship outside state inclusion. What does immigrant justice work look like when legalization is not its central goal?

This article argues that settler colonialism structures Indigenous rights in Brazil and shows how Indigenous peoples have also engaged Indigenous rights to interrupt settler colonialism. To this end, it turns to the 20 th century (re-)emergence of officially "extinct" Indigenous peoples in Brazil's Northeast Region and the central role of the toré ritual in this process. While the toré reversed the settler colonial logic of Indigenous elimination and dispossession, the Indigenous (re-)emergences also operated within the possibilities of settler policy. Lingering in the tense gap between citizenship's limits and possibilities under settler colonialism, the article argues that the toré, by mobilizing bodies, land, culture, and memory, underscores the performative aspect of citizenship and the role of embodied practices in decolonization. Stressing the imbrication of the performative, the material, and the political, the paper offers a Brazilian perspective on debates on Indigenous refusal and the politics of recognition, challenging their simplistic dichotomization.

In order to address pragmatic issues with their students, teachers need access to empirical data and research results on how speech acts are performed by native speakers of the target language in various contexts. The present paper aims at exploring how the invitation-refusal sequence is realised in a sample of semi-spontaneous interactions between young speakers of Italian at an intermediate social distance. The study focuses specifically on the role of insistence in the context of an informal invitation to a party. 94 invitation-refusal dialogues performed by university students residing in Rome's area are analysed. Results show that insistence after a refusal is a frequent and expected reaction, even though not always produced. This reveals some similarities between Italian language/culture and some South-American cultures where insistence seems to be a "necessary" routine that helps strengthen the links of affiliation among community members.

Since Israel’s inception, the Zionist agenda has worked meticulously to systematically erase all traces of Palestinian presence from space and time. Today, there are few traces left that indicate otherwise. Palestinian graffiti is one such trace. The growing presence of Palestinian graffiti in the West Bank, Gaza, and its surrounding Occupied Territories, illuminates this reality. Palestinian graffiti, then, ought to be read as occupying a unique and inherently political space within Israel’s settler colonial society. This is the focus of my paper. I contend that Palestinian graffiti is a form of collective cultural remembering that operates through a “liminal praxis ” (Martineau and Ritskes, pp. V, 2014) that destroys and reclaims space and spatial customs; resists exclusion and invisibility; undermines ownership and private property; remains illegible to oppressive power; and (re)imagines new ways of thinking that disrupt colonial modes of being and sensing.

La dichotomie entre « consentement » et « contrainte » a pris une certaine importance dans les débats récents portant sur l'expérience des sociétés pendant la Première Guerre mondiale. Cet ouvrage a pour ambition de reformuler la problématique de l’engagement des populations dans le conflit à travers une approche renouvelée. Il dépasse les oppositions trop rigides entre consensus sur la guerre et rejet de celle-ci, considérant que les populations, tant civiles que militaires, ne se réduisent pas à des éléments passifs mais gardent leur capacité de réaction autonome. Aussi propose-t-il une terminologie ternaire pour aborder les expériences des peuples en guerre – accepter, endurer, refuser. Le terme moyen, « endurer », permet d’explorer toute la complexité d’un conflit qui défie les prévisions et dont le prix en vies et souffrances remet en cause la question du rapport entre les fins et les moyens. Il ne s’agit pas, toutefois, de présenter une évolution successive d’un terme à l’autre – de l’acceptation à l’endurance, avant d’en arriver au refus. Car tout dépend des multiples sens assignés à chaque comportement, et du chevauchement possible des différentes réactions que suscite la confrontation à la guerre.
Ces trois termes offrent plusieurs avantages sur une échelle qui va de l’individuel au collectif. Ils se prêtent à la prise en compte de l’imaginaire de la guerre et des multiples discours qui l’accompagnent. Ils permettent également d’examiner où, quand et comment le refus prend le dessus sur l’endurance par rapport aux sociétés où l’endurance s’appuie jusqu’à la fin sur une acceptation du conflit – et ce malgré son caractère inexorable.
Cet ouvrage, fondé sur des travaux originaux suscités par le Centre international de recherche de l’Historial de la Grande Guerre, à Péronne, réunit des historiens européens et américains, parmi les meilleurs spécialistes internationaux de la Première Guerre mondiale. Par sa focale authentiquement internationale, son attention portée au front oriental autant qu’occidental, il transcende les débats étroitement nationaux.

Since 2015, an unprecedented number of people from Middle Eastern and African countries have crossed borders into and within Europe. Media and political actors describe this time as an "emergency" and a "crisis" that challenges the core of European values and human rights principles. Calling this a crisis implies responding to it, on the one hand, with humanitarian gestures of saving lives, and, on the other, with stricter border control. I reflect on the grammar of crisis and the forms of care that it simultaneously enables and disables. I am inspired by the relationship between two painters-from Tunisia and Nigeria-and their forms of therapeutic and ethical explorations through art. I propose to attend to practices that bear witness to other grammars, or the lack thereof. These practices are the expression of a denial, or, better, of an interruption in the language of the crisis and pathology.

In this paper, mobile communication is examined in the context of forced migration from an affective perspective using the case study of an informal migrant camp that was established in 2015 at Budapest's Keleti train station. Drawing on concepts of migration, affect and media, I examine various news reports and social media commentary about the camp as well as the makeshift Wi-Fi network that was established there in relation to Hungarian populist politics. I posit the station as a site of contestation between migrants, the Hungarian government and non-governmental actors that speaks to the politici-sation of communication technology. The conclusion points to how mobile communication provides a way for forced migrants to create a heterotopic space in extreme conditions as the migrant community is affectively moored by media practices that enable feelings of familiarity and security. These practices not only constitute a kind of refuge for migrants but also offer a form of refusal, however small, towards the shaming and inertia they experience.

Special Issue, The Origins of the Welfare State: Global and Comparative Approaches Co-edited by Agnoletto, S. and Palmieri, C. http://zapruderworld.org/journal/archive/volume-3/overcoming-barriers-to-voluntary-servitude-positive-thinking-and-self-help-the-post-political-ideology-of-workfare/