Meditation: On Refusing To Stay In A Designated Place

Acts of theorizing and practicing refusal are ongoing presences in my research and pedagogical work. For instance, in a graduate course that I teach called “Centering Blackness in Education Research” we spend time thinking-with refusal in relation to Black feminist scholars and artists. We intentionally grapple with what is activated when we encounter refusal as modes of affirming Black, Indigenous, and Black-Indigenous life—as what Tina Campt (2019) calls “using negation as a generativeand creative source of disorderly powerto embrace the possibility of living otherwise” (n.p., emphasis added). Starting with the (seeming) contradiction of refusal as affirmative is a means of insisting that we ask research questions that are not aimed at proving or revealing the status quo that is anti-Blackness and coloniality in education. Instead, the intent is to invite curiosity about what is already present and what is desired-needed for livable Black, Indigenous and Black-Indigenous educational futurities. Thinking with refusal as requiring inventive inquiry and imaginaries is also an invitation to encounter education research in creative, transdisciplinary ways. In this regard, our orientations towards education research sit alongside Black studies’ insistence on the entanglements between theoretical and creative work (McKittrick, 2021). In our work together, refusal, as well other concepts including futurity, fugitivity, and relationality are activated as theory, method, and practices to think-with, walk-with, and make-with in researching situated Black, Indigenous and Black-Indigenous educational lives.