Format/Structure

Refusal, silence, and disengagement are routinely discarded as methodological failure. This workshop argues they are something else entirely — critiques of co-production's specific promise of inclusion.

Long Abstract

Participatory and co-production research frameworks carry an explicit institutional promise of inclusion and meaningful engagement (Norström et al., 2020; Reed, 2008). When refusal, silence, or disengagement occur within them, they constitute a critique not merely of research relationships generally, but of a specific methodological claim — that co-production can reliably deliver the equitable knowledge partnerships it promises (Wyborn et al., 2019). Yet such encounters are routinely discarded as failed data collection rather than treated as analytically meaningful. This workshop addresses that gap.

Drawing on scholarship on ethnographic refusal, everyday resistance, and knowledge politics (Scott, 1985; Simpson, 2007; Tuck & Yang, 2014; TallBear, 2014), the workshop aims to develop a preliminary typology distinguishing analytically distinct forms of non-participation — outright refusal, sustained silence, hesitation, strategic evasiveness, apparently irrelevant responses, and gradual disengagement — each reflecting different political, relational, and communicative dynamics and connecting to different theoretical traditions (Fujii, 2010; de Laat, 2019).

Methodologically, participants will submit brief anonymized written excerpts documenting fieldwork encounters with non-participation. Excerpts will be physically separated and redistributed across small groups for collaborative thematic analysis, treating the pooled material as a shared qualitative dataset. Groups will classify excerpts by form of non-participation and discuss what each reveals about research relationships and the limits of co-production frameworks. A post-workshop working group will formalize findings into a collaborative commentary for submission to an interdisciplinary journal.

Ethically, the workshop treats refusal as a mirror pointed at researchers rather than a window into those who refused. The unit of analysis is the research encounter and researcher reflexivity, not the individual who declined participation. All excerpts will be double-anonymized, and a dedicated segment will engage participants in discussing the ethics of this analytical approach itself.