Knowledge re-pair workshops are hands-on experiential and interactive workshops that aim to reimagine contemporary digital infrastructures through decolonial praxis. Departing from various R-words in decolonial and indigenous research (relationality, repair, refusal, regeneration…), this workshop series opens up alternative ways of relating to technologies around us.
R is for Refusal
Reclaiming our Futures Festival, Nijmegen | September 2026
The workshop departs from ‘Refusal’ and ‘Repair’, 2 R-words informed by black studies and decolonial research (”R-words: Refusing Research”, Tuck and Yang), in the context of technology and computation. It is co-hosted by Evelyn Wan (UU) and George Fletcher (TU/e), who share a desire to refuse the machine and its extractive logics. ‘Refusal’ has been an operant keyword in our research and praxis, layered through practices of data refusal, digital disconnection, withdrawal, fugitivity, and ‘consent not to be a single being’ (Glissant/ Moten). In the workshop, we establish a shared starting point through examining the concept of ‘refusal’ in reference to our research.
We then collectively chart pathways from refusal towards re-pair, through a slow dialogue outside of productive time. Repair, in our definition, does not only refer to mending wounds of technological extraction and exploitation, but also to re-pairing our divergent lines of thoughts and practices, as exemplified by the literal coming-together of our two disciplines of ‘media and performance studies’ and ‘computer science’. Between the hard rationality of STEM and the poetics of humanistic approaches, we re-pair the cognitive and theoretical with the affective and experiential, and integrate what often remain abstract conceptual discussions into the somatic and relational fabrics of our daily life.
EVELYN WAN 
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