Inspired by the work of the #CiteBlackWomen collective, this experimental course in Spring 2022 at the CUNY Graduate Center Masters in Liberal Studies Program asks: How can citational practices be used as a method for radical futurism and world-making? How can we improve the caliber of our scholarship by challenging the socially constructed norms about what constitutes the canon? How are bibliographies radical documents? In this course, students conducting research developed a confident citational practice with greater understanding of the politics of citation. We explored:
- Who gets cited and why?
- The vicious cycle of popularity and algorithms
- Hacking the algorithm in the interest not just of representation but of scholarship
- How to do research in ways that are not the same as buying a pair of shoes
- Academic integrity: the ethical implications of an inclusive citation practice
We produced the following resources:
- Course bibliography for public use on Zotero and Google Scholar
- Citational practice statements
- Topical Annotated Bibliographies for public use on Zotero
Soon, we hope to release a podcast episode created from the guest speakers’ presentations.
Guest speakers:
- Jill Cirasella, Associate Librarian for Scholarly Communication. Cirasella’s Presentation is an Open Educational Resource: https://bit.ly/gc-citing-2022
- Sonia Das, Associate Professor, New York University, Co-Editor-In-Chief, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology
- Dána-Ain Davis, Professor of Anthropology, CUNY Graduate Center/Queens College, founding co-editor of Feminist Anthropology
- Joshua Schrier, Professor of Chemistry at Fordhman University
- Christen A. Smith, Associate Professor African and African Diaspora Studies and Anthropology at University of Texas at Austin and founder of Cite Black Women Collective.
Designed as a companion course with or in anticipation of a research methods, capstone or thesis course, this course enhances students’ familiarity with and use of citational practices in interdisciplinary contexts. Rather than a punitive and meaningless exercise in mastery of format, this course enables students to view citation as an extension of ethical and scholarly practices: a way to ensure as broad and inclusive a net as possible of relevant publications in review of literature, while understanding citation as a meaningful means of attribution and construction of scholarly social networks. Recent requests from students indicate that citation is an area of confusion and anxiety for research active students.
Learning Objectives:
- Analyze the history of citational practices in western and nonwestern contexts
- Comprehend that citational practices are dialogical, contextual and ever changing
- Learn to identify and use multiple citation styles
- Develop skills in “hacking” search engine algorithms to more reliably identify relevant literature, rather than simply citing what has been most frequently cited before
- Identify ways that citation is always political and reflective of social hierarchies and biases within disciplines and in the world
- Trace efforts by individuals and collectives to deploy citational practice as a means for disrupting the reproduction of social hierarchies in the academy
- Develop a personal citational practice that is effective, scalable to different research projects, and meaningful
