5.1.4: A Final Plea

As I conclude this project, I do not want to make a claim that all knowledge is useless, or that research should not be done. Knowledge work should continue; after all, that is why I have committed to this labor. I hope my work is valuable to someone for their own thinking.

What I am saying is that the ideological and epistemic system within which knowledge is made needs to be dramatically reassessed. For me, that reassessment comes from the context of ethics, and specifically an ethics that is in dialogue with scholars who come from communities that would have been considered a subject or object in previous decades. This kind of ethics is embedded, contingent, and imperfect.¹

One of the things that I witness when talking with scholars about ethics, is that they tend to think of it in terms of a check list—‘I can get institutional review board (IRB) approval, and then I do not have to worry about any harms.’ Ethics, for these scholars, is a hoop to jump through, not a relationship to their research interlocutor, subject, or object. In this context, should the proper forms be filled out, should the proper precautions be in place, then anything that the researcher does is deemed ethical. This kind of approach is the lowest bar: a necessary step, especially because of what can happen if informed consent is ignored, but one in which harm is still possible.

Research ethics are about the relationship between a researcher, their interlocutors, subjects, and objects. As researchers, we are obligated to care for them,² and often caring for someone or something means keeping their secrets.³ Édouard Glissant’s concept of opacity was argued in terms of the individual: someone could refuse inclusion into a totalitarian knowledge system, and refuse the ways those systems reduce, define, and describe their subjects (4.2.3).⁴ What I would like to challenge academics to take on is an ethics of refusal. At small scales this can incorporate refusal as a means to deny access to individual, communal, or sacred information that has been shared with scholars.⁵ Community-based and public humanities researchers have shown how knowledge workers engaging with communities can assist those groups.⁶ Refusal is a necessary tool in gaining and maintaining trust in those communities.⁷

On a larger scale, I want to imagine refusal as a means to short-circuit the capitalistic ideologies which are maintained in our academic systems (5.1.3). After watching most of my colleagues graduate and flounder on the academic job market, after watching Indiana University’s (IU) Media School—formed under a guise of cross disciplinary conversation—fight amongst itself regarding supreme epistemic authority, and after watching IU dismantle the Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities (IDAH) and the Center for Research on Race, Ethnicity, and Society (CRRES), I cannot say I have any love for the system in which I write. Moreover, at least in regard to IDAH and CRRES’ stellar record of publications, speakers, graduate students, and impact on the university’s research community in spite of their minuscule budgets, I doubt as to whether the scale of research has anything to do with who gets funding, what organizations get to exist, and who gets to be employable in the academy.

On this larger scale, refusal is only possible should it be accepted within the established tenure and promotion guidelines. Refusal in these guidelines would reward less research, done with kindness and obligation to one’s research interlocutors. It is only possible should those hiring new faculty be willing to fight for junior scholar’s ability to do careful, conscientious research. It is only possible if as a coalition, we scholars can admit to the ideologies which are driving our institutions toward the impossibility of infinite growth—more students, more buildings, more grant funding, more campuses, more publications. Even then, faculty voices only speak so loudly, especially when a university’s administration ignores every note, plea, or comment directed by any faculty governing body.

Frankly, I am not in a place to refuse anything, because I have no long-term future in the academic system. I am one of hundreds of scholars who is hungrily reaching for the promise of a tenure track line, and who will, most likely, give up in a year or two after dozens of failed applications. The system will refuse me.

Refusal is antithetical to our current academic system, but it is not antagonistic to knowledge production in general. My critiques of western epistemics throughout this dissertation have been around the value systems which are used to produce cultural, epistemic, and economic power. Knowledge is not Knowledge, but a fragmented collection of knowledges.⁸ The science that drove anatomy in the nineteenth century is methodologically and epistemically distinct from the science that drove pathology, germ theory, and public health in the same period.⁹ Many knowledges are possible, including ones tempered with refusal, obligation, and care.

What I call for is a refusal to willingly produce into a system that will devour anyone and everyone for its own expansion, for its own benefit, all the while chewing up the people within—researchers, students, subjects. That academy has no future. At present, I doubt any other version of the academy is possible at all.