Pedagogy of ‘Refusing’ – commentary to Siriwardane-de Zoysa, Sreekanta, Mwambari, Mehta and Majumder


URN:NBN:fi:tsv-oa126102
DOI: 10.11143/fennia.126102

Special issue: Practising refusal as relating otherwise: engagements with knowledge 
production, ‘activist’ praxis, and borders

Reflections

Pedagogy of ‘Refusing’ – commentary to Siriwardane-de Zoysa, 
Sreekanta, Mwambari, Mehta and Majumder

SAYAN DEY

Dey, S. (2023) Pedagogy of ‘Refusing’ – commentary to Siriwardane-de 
Zoysa, Sreekanta, Mwambari, Mehta and Majumder. Fennia 201(2)  
273–276. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.126102

This commentary is a critical response to the dialogic essay “The unruly 
arts of ethnographic refusal: power, politics, performativity” that unpacks 
the complex performances of hierarchies and violence as performed 
during ethnographic research works in anthropology. During ethno-
graphic research works, the encounter between the researchers and  
the research participants are often underlaid with tensions that either 
compel the participants to speak in definite patterns to satisfy the 
demands of the researchers or force the researchers to conduct field 
works according to the advisable guidelines of the academic institutions, 
funding agencies and contact persons. On the basis of my personal 
experiences and the ethnographic experiences of the authors of the essay, 
this commentary argues how the performance and acknowledgment of 
‘refusal’ can be adopted as a research methodology in anthropology and 
other academic disciplines to counter the colonial/Eurocentric parameters 
of knowledge production. 

Keywords: refusing, pedagogy, methodology, tensions, colonial/Eurocentric

Sayan Dey (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7569-5519), Department of Language 
and Literature, Alliance University, Bangalore, India. Email: sayandey89@
yahoo.com

Introduction
The dialogic essay by Rapti, Vani, David, Simi and Madhurima bring forth their respective ethnographic 
research experiences in East Africa and South and Southeast Asia as activists, scholars, educators and 
development practitioners. While discussing about the research experiences, the authors share about 
the diverse hierarchical and violent field work practices that are prominent in ethnographic researches 
and how, both individually and collectively, they have navigated through the challenges. The 
commentary specifically focuses on the argument about the necessity of acknowledging the values of 
silences and refusals while interacting with communities. The commentary also discusses why it is 
necessary to realize the performance of refusals and silences as a pedagogical and methodological 
practice in daily research works.

© 2023 by the author. This open access article is licensed under 
a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.126102
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7569-5519


FENNIA 201(2) (2023)Reflections274

Disrupting the colonial pedagogy of ‘being forced’ to speak
The violence of the Eurocentric methods of knowledge production was unleashed by the colonizers 
through different pedagogical and methodological initiatives and one of them was to extract and 
expropriated the ancestral knowledge systems of the indigenous communities of the Global South. 
The planetary project of extraction and expropriation began with identifying and mapping the 
indigenous communities, and then using them for various social, cultural, political, economic, 
biological and racial experiments. In order to conduct the experiments successfully, the colonizers 
forced the native indigenous communities to reveal their ancestral knowledge values so that their 
cultural and geopolitical systems can be hijacked, distorted and misappropriated. Those who resisted 
the epistemological and the ontological violence of the colonizers where subjected to physical and 
psychological abuse.

In the contemporary era, especially during research field works, the colonially structured processes 
of extractions, expropriations and abuses, through forcing individuals to speak, take place in a 
systemic manner, by demonizing and marginalizing those research participants who show reluctance 
to speak (Siriwardane-de Zoysa et al. 2023). In this regard, I would like to share a personal anecdote 
(which is also collective at the same time) here. While co-designing a research project with an Anglo-
Indian community in Kolkata (a city in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal) in 2018, I and my co-
researchers were consistently struggling to shape research questions in a way so that the research 
participants are not treated as objects of data collection. We consistently tried to make sure that the 
research participants are acknowledged as co-researchers and their respective positionalities and 
ways of thinking are duly respected. But, in the process of respecting and acknowledging their 
positionalities and diverse ways of expressions, it is crucial to confess that a lot of times we struggled 
to accept a situation where the research participants refused to respond to some of our questions. 
Especially at the beginning of the project, we interpreted the refusals as our failure to collect ‘necessary’ 
information. But, with the passage of time, as the project started building up and we started critically 
engaging with the refusals, we realized that the performance of refusals and silences does not portray 
incapability and failure of a research project. On the contrary, the performance of refusal can be 
understood as a methodology that has the potential to dismantle the “binaries between action and 
complicity, disclosure and concealment [and] the visible and hidden” (Siriwardane-de Zoysa et al. 
2023, 172). A critical intervention of the refusals also allowed us to categorically question the colonial 
“regimes of representation” (Tuck & Yang 2014, 227) that have been regulating every paradigm of 
knowledge production for generations.

This dialogic essay allowed me to revisit the tensions of refusals that me and my co-researchers 
once encountered on the one side and reminded me of the necessity of celebrating the performance 
of refusals and silences as a habitual pedagogical practice on the other. In this essay, through various 
personal field work experiences, the authors have also argued how analyzing the performances of 
refusals from a critical methodological lens made them realize the hidden social dynamics and power 
structures that exist around us. The bureaucratic experiences of Simi with funding agencies, the 
gendered experiences of Vani and Madhurima in the Sundarbans, the racial and emotional experiences 
of David in Uganda, and the geopolitical experiences of Rapti in Malaysia show that the phenomena 
of refusals and silences in several pedagogical forms generate “liminal moments which temporarily 
suspend presumed hierarchies, make visible that which is explicitly or otherwise hidden, and allows 
for the subversion of power” (Siriwardane-de Zoysa et al. 2023, 179).

Practicing pedagogy of ‘refusing’: possible challenges
Prior to sharing the possible challenges, I would like to clarify that I am not speaking on behalf of the 
authors of this essay and I am speaking only from my personal experiences.

Some possible challenges are:
a. Lack of understanding of silences and refusals: With respect to my field work experiences in 

India, South Africa and Bhutan to date, I have realized that developing a critical understanding 



FENNIA 201(2) (2023) Sayan Dey 275

of silences and refusals alone won't help. It is important to locate the lack of understanding of 
silences and refusals within a broader framework of our respective social, cultural and 
intellectual upbringing. As a child, I have always been taught that it is important to speak 
vocally and make effort to respond to every question. In case I failed or showed reluctance to 
speak and respond, I was immediately denounced as intellectually incapable and culturally 
arrogant (Dey 2022). Later on, as a tutor and researcher, I have realized that the situation has 
not transformed much in the contemporary era where the “psychological nuances and 
contexts of silence” (Corbin 2018, 26) are systemically ignored and vocal expressions are 
regarded as the most authentic mode of expression. As a result, it is crucial to address the 
necessity of performing refusals and silences not only during research field works, but also in 
schools, higher educational institutions, homes, and neighborhoods.

b. Ignorance towards Critical Diversity Literacy (CDL): CDL is a transdisciplinary research 
framework that generates de-hierarchical and collaborative spaces of knowledge 
dissemination, where “differences of many varieties increasingly co-exist” (Steyn 2015, 380). 
CDL also enables individuals to “‘read’ prevailing social relations as one would a text, 
recognizing the ways in which possibilities are being opened up or close for those differently 
positioned within the unfolding dynamics of specific social contexts” (Steyn 2015, 381). The 
lack of understanding of silences and refusals as critical and ethical patterns of knowledge 
production is also associated with our habitual failure to understand the role of power in 
constructing differences; recognize unequal symbolic and material values; unpack how 
systems of oppression intersects, co-constructs and constitute each other; and possess 
diverse vocabularies and grammars to critically engage with narratives of privileges and 
oppressions. Hence, it is important to explore the possibilities of developing CDL as a research 
framework on the one side and as a way of celebrating every existential difference and 
diversity on the other.

c. Tensions between the individuals and the institutions: The aspect of tension between the 
individual and the institution is another possible challenge that may emerge while 
methodologically and pedagogically performing silences and refusals during research. To 
elaborate further, the desire to celebrate silences and refusals as critical methods of 
knowledge production poses a threat to the capitalistic, self-profiting and neoliberal 
functional patterns of the universities across the world. So, there is a high possibility that in 
the process of acknowledging silences and refusals and interrogating the hierarchical, 
disrespectful and abusive research approaches of an institution, a research project may get 
dismissed. So, in the context of acknowledging silences and refusals as a critical research 
method in the higher educational institutions, it is necessary to explore the possible ways of 
navigating the tensions between the individuals and the institutions.

Continuity: ways forward
The purpose of outlining the possible challenges in the previous section and writing this commentary 
is to open up further spaces of discussions on “refusal as recognition in collaboration, teaching and 
praxis” (Siriwardane-de Zoysa et al. 2023, 178) across different formal and informal trajectories of 
knowledge production. As a researcher, who works in the interface of humanities and social sciences, 
I firmly believe that the arguments in the essay will not only be beneficial for scholars in the discipline 
of anthropology, but also for the scholars, who are working in various other academic disciplines that 
require regular interaction with communities. 

References
Corbin, A. (2018) A History of Silence: From the Renaissance to the Present Day. Polity, Cambridge.
Dey, S. (2022) Pedagogy of performative silence. Philosophy and Global Affairs Journal 2(1) 15–40. 

https://doi.org/10.5840/pga202282926

https://doi.org/10.5840/pga202282926


FENNIA 201(2) (2023)Reflections276

Siriwardane-de Zoysa, R., Sreekanta, V., Mwambari, D., Mehta, S. & Majumder, M. (2023) The  
unruly arts of ethnographic refusal: power, politics, performativity. Fennia 201(2) 169–182.  
https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.121832

Steyn, M. (2015) Critical diversity literacy: essentials for the twenty-first century. In Vertovec, S. (ed.) 
Routledge International Handbook of Diversity Studies, 379–389. Routledge, London.  
https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315747224 

Tuck, E. & Yang, K. W. (2014) R-words: refusing research. In Paris, D. & Winn, M. T. (eds.) Humanizing 
Research: Decolonizing Qualitative Inquiry with Youth and Communities, 223–248. Sage, Los Angeles.

https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.121832
https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315747224