Hand in hand: refusing research during a pandemic

Abstract

What does it mean to refuse research during a pandemic? The COVID-19 pandemic has forced us to reckon with old wounds and underlying conditions, particularly the ways in which these extreme inequalities are circumvented in research. In addressing pandemic failures the article addresses the ways in which research is complicit and how research has been re-invented under the conditions of the pandemic yet is still under the logics of extractivism and in service of the neoliberal university. Using refusal and abolition as generative theoretical groundings, the article seeks radical alternatives to reclaiming research as practice. Through the retraditioning of knowledges through ancestry, spirituality and positionality we can start to reclaim research as practice. Thus, in our refusal to go back to ‘normal’, practicing research becomes the first step in organizing in anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-colonial and anti-racist ways.