When is it right, or even necessary, to say “no”?

Refusing can be a powerful act—whether it’s standing up to authority, rejecting harmful norms, or pushing back against injustice. But when is saying “no” the right thing to do? And what are the stakes when we decide to refuse? Often our refusals are quotidian and inconsequential, but sometimes, and sometimes without our knowledge, they’re huge.

We often underestimate how often we issue refusals, both large and small, and we don’t consider carefully enough the moral and political dimensions of those acts. It’s not always easy to decide when it is appropriate to refuse, and even when we know it’s necessary, it’s not always easy. Our guest today, Dr. Devonya Havis University of Buffalo), has been thinking about the ethics and politics of refusal for some time, and how how refusing to go along with something can be an act of courage, rebellion, or survival.

We’re going to ask what happens when– in the immortal words of Nancy Reagan– you “just say no.”

In this episode, we discuss the following thinkers/ideas/texts/etc.:

• Steven Spielberg‘s filmography
• Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Film, 1977)
• Devonya Havis, Creating a Black Vernacular Philosophy (2022) 
• Immersion East Side Program (Buffalo, NY)
• Miles Davis, Sketches of Spain (album)
• “doomscrolling”
• Our Season 4, Episode 56 conversation with Blake Zolfo about “Musical Theater”
• Plato, Apology
• Plato, Crito 
• Martin Luther King, Jr. “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”
• The Milgram Experiment
• Audra Simpson, “On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, ‘Voice,’ and Colonial Citizenship” (Junctures: The Journal for Thematic Dialogue, 2007)
• Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)
• Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975)
• Charles Mills, “Ideal Theory as Ideology” (2005)
• I Ching: The Book of Changes 
• Naomi Osaka’s refusal
• Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America (1997)
• Falguni A. Sheth, Unruly Women: Race, Neocolonialism, and the Hijab (2022)
• Joshua Coleman, “A Shift in American Family Values is Fueling Estrangement” (The Atlantic, October 2024)
• Libertarianism
• Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (1788)
• Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (1956)
• Kant’s Categorical Imperative
• Michel Foucault on “normalization”
• Our Season 4, Episode 59 conversation with Ladelle McWhorter about “Queers”
• “5 Things to Know About Faulty Pay Today”
• Tedd Seigel, Signs of the Great Refusal: The Coming Struggle for a Post-Work Society (2023)
• James Baldwin, The Evidence of Things No Seen (1985)
• Our Season 11, Episode 155 conversation with Zahi Zalloua about “Zionist ressentiment, the Left, and the Palestinian Question”