“How can the dead consent?”: Reclamation, research, and the right to say nothing

Abstract This essay explores the ethical and political dilemmas of conducting research on the dead, particularly those whose lives were shaped by marginalization, trauma, and erasure. Drawing on experiences from the classroom, fieldwork in mass graves and marginalized cemeteries, and community‐based reclamation projects, I examine how the dead emerge as figures of fugitive agency—present but resistant, unavailable to the forms of consent and legibility demanded by institutional research ethics. Inspired by student insights, Indigenous and Black studies scholarship on refusal and fugitivity, and feminist relational ethics, I argue that the dead challenge dominant models of research participation and accountability. While the essay is primarily written in prose, it also includes comics illustrations that reflect on silence, refusal, and the limits of representation. Across these varied research contexts and multiple modes of scholarship, I ask what it might mean to honor the dead's right to say nothing—and how researchers might dwell ethically within that silence.