Drawing the Contours of Ethnography: Ethnographic Refusal and Anarchistic Consent in Fieldwork and Writing

Research participants and researchers participate together to draw the contours of ethnography. Refusals and consents shape any given ethnographic research and writing project. Setting out on an ethnographic field research project, I followed a contact to an "un-named" city in the US to study how local chapters of an anarchist-inspired project ("Food Not Bombs") confronted challenges presented by spatial politics. While this city has a name, it is not one I can share. This is the subject of this paper. What is the place of refusal in ethnographic research design and implementation? What does "consent" mean in an anarchist context? In this paper, I will describe my experience acquiring consent to research (with) an anarchistic organization, how anarchistic (dis)organization presents challenges to an institutional consent process, and how that same (dis)organization can open up opportunities for more robust collaboration. Drawing on McGranahan (2016), Ortner (1995), and Simpson (2007), I look at the concept of refusal in the context of ethnographic research. I then use my own experiences and failures to interrogate the meanings of consent and the place of refusal in ethnographic research.