The Transformative Methods in the Humanities and Social Sciences Reading Group will be holding a meeting covering refusal-based methodologies developed in anthropology. This two-hour conversation will let participants engage with the scholarship that works to protect the rights, knowledges, and material culture of research interlocutors.

Participants are requested to read the following texts ahead of time. They are available on Box. 

Selected Readings: 

McGranahan, Carole. 2016. “Theorizing Refusal: An Introduction.” Cultural Anthropology 31 (3): 319–25.

Simpson, Audra. 2007. “On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, ‘Voice’ and Colonial Citizenship.” Junctures 9: 67–80.

Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. 2014. “Unbecoming Claims: Pedagogies of Refusal in Qualitative Research.” Qualitative Inquiry 20 (6): 811–18.

About this Session’s Readings 

These readings theorize approach the theoretical and methodological possibilities of refusal in academic research. Refusal is a methodology which responds to the historical practices that have mined communities for academic research, often benefitting knowledge institutions and harming underserved communities in the process. Refusal, as it is drawn from anthropological arguments, provides an intentional, but often unstated, approach to resistance in research that can be leveraged by both researchers and research interlocutors.

About the Transformative Methods Reading Group 

The Transformative Methods in the Humanities and Social Sciences Reading Group is a bi-monthly conversation exploring new and emerging methodologies that address epistemic gaps in qualitative and quantitative research. 

The goal of this group is to introduce these methodologies to scholars from across the university. These approaches illustrate a different vantage point that can help reveal unseen problems in a variety of fields. The reading group will offer participants an onramp to these methods, enabling conversations across disciplines that can strengthen research into the social determinants of health, as well as research into the experiences of health and wellness.  

Co-sponsored by the Emancipatory Sciences Lab, the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, and run as part of the Archives and Special Collections’ Digital Health Humanities program. 

UCSF welcomes everyone, including people with disabilities to our events and exhibits. To request a reasonable accommodation for this event, please contact Sean Purcell by emailing sean.purcell@ucsf.edu as soon as possible.