Resources
These texts can help you hold onto your agency and working‑class voice inside higher education. Becoming well read isn’t about proving legitimacy to hierarchical systems — it’s about refusing the narrow forms of knowledge they try to impose. These resources offer alternatives, openings, and companions in resisting epistemic violence.
Black studies & abolitionist refusal
Saidiya Hartman – refusal of the archive; waywardness.
Fred Moten & Stefano Harney – fugitivity, undercommons, refusal of institutional capture.
Tina Campt – quiet refusal, haptic listening.
Christina Sharpe – refusal as “wake work”.
Indigenous refusal
Audra Simpson – political refusal, ethnographic refusal.
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson – Indigenous refusal as resurgence.
Glen Coulthard – refusal of recognition politics.
Feminist & queer refusal
Sara Ahmed – willfulness, complaint as refusal.
Jack Halberstam – unproductivity, unbecoming as refusal.
José Esteban Muñoz – queer utopian refusal.
Philosophical refusal
Giorgio Agamben – inoperativity (central to Honig’s reading).
Herman Melville – Bartleby as refusal (“I would prefer not to”)
More refusal Theorists:
Carole McGranahan – foundational in theorising refusal as generative, relational, and ethnographic.
Bonnie Honig – develops feminist refusal as world‑building, drawing on The Bacchae.
Marcel Mauss – early theorist of refusal in The Gift (refusal as cutting or remaking social relations).
James C. Scott – everyday refusal, infrapolitics.
K. Sivaramakrishnan – refusal in environmental and political anthropology.
David Graeber – creative refusal as world‑making and rejection of dominant political projects.
Lila Abu‑Lughod – critiques resistance frameworks; foundational for refusal’s genealogy.