Audra Simpson’s monograph Mohawk Interruptus makes a tripartite intervention in studying Iroquois community: firstly, Simpson offers an analytic of “nested sovereignty;” secondly, the “recognition” clause in the political logics of multiculturalism has been problematized; and lastly, the fields of anthropology and political science have critiqued for its complicity in settler colonialism and following ahistorical, static frameworks. Instead, Simpson invents her own method that she calls “ethnographic refusal.” Refusal, in her terms, is an a posteriori method that makes sense of her interlocutors’ failure to conform to economic norms, nation-state boundaries and citizenship norms in the region.

In her methodology section, Simpson discusses her method of interviewing her family members and then not including their voices in her final project that I found propelling. I always felt hesitant about incorporating voices of my family and close friends in my oral history project but Simpson’s method has triggered me to incorporate them as a context. Also, she did not interview people that had been interviewed by others and contrasted her findings with the “official’ material on the subject.

Simpson incorporates her own fieldwork encounters with the security guards in a chapter form. I was wondering if this is something that she was able to accomplish in the monograph form. Can something this personal be incorporated as an entire dissertation chapter in the history department?