Bringing Refusal into Research

Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) is a research approach that holds the potential to democratize knowledge creation by engaging the epistemic expertise of those whose knowledge and subjectivity have historically been denied. However, despite its democratic values, CBPR can still reproduce inequalities, including racism, due to existing power structures. Drawing from a body of Indigenous scholarship on the liberatory potential of refusal as a practice of generative boundary setting, as well as from insights gained through my own CBPR practice, I explore in this paper the ethical and epistemological premises of refusing. I argue that bringing refusal into CBPR and beyond creates a powerful framework not only for negating prevailing colonial forms of knowledge creation, but also for creating more equitable relationships between researchers and subjects. Refusal-oriented CBPR thus becomes a possible approach for advancing subjectivation studies, especially insofar as the latter pursues decoloniality as a methodological practice.