Epistemic Doubt as Method: Kinship, Refusal, and the Anticolonial Ethics of Researching the Familiar

In this paper, I introduce epistemic doubt and reflexive refusal as an anticolonial methodology for qualitative research. Tracing my attempt to study my brother’s memories of our racially divided hometown, I demonstrate how doubt, arising from the incommensurable tensions between kinship ethics and researcher positionality, ruptures extractive research logics, culminating in refusal: the rejection of transcription, analysis, or academic circulation of his narrative. Open questions emerge: whether centring doubt as ethical reckoning can recalibrate research towards relational accountability, or whether it risks protecting the researcher’s own narrative. The refusal at the core of this research, embodied in the silence of my brother’s withheld story, is reframed as generative resistance, one that I do not claim to have fully disentangled from self-protection. I contribute to research-refusal scholarship by holding open the question of who refusal serves, whilst challenging the entitlement of the academy to marginalised stories.