Syllabus

Citational Practices and Politics: Writing for Liberation

1 credit, Hybrid format.

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 will develop a confident citational practice with greater understanding of the politics of citation. We will explore: 

  • 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

Designed as a companion course with or in anticipation of a research methods, capstone or thesis course, this course will enhance 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. 

4. 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

Topics:

  • Understanding academic search engines and citation indexes
  • Histories of citational practices and debates about them
  • Academic integrity and research ethics
  • “Hacking” academic search engines and citation indexes to identify how algorithms make some things hypervisible and others less visible
  • Debates about the notion of a “canon”
  • Bibliographies as expressions of the world as we see it, “love letters” to those who have shaped our thinking
  • Annotated bibliographies and syllabi as radical documents

Course Requirements:

  • Active engagement in class sessions.
  • Assignments:
    • Personal citational statement.
    • Annotated critical bibliography (Zotero and webpage) on a subject of student’s choice.

Readings and materials:

Complete citations are at these links: Bibliography on Citational Politics and Practices on Zotero and Google Scholar.  

Ahmed, Sara. 2019. What’s the Use? Duke University Press.

Anzaldúa, Gloria. 2015. Light in the Dark/Luz En Lo Oscuro. Duke University Press.

Baskaran, Priya. 2020. “Service, Scholarship, and Radical Citation Practice.” Rutgers UL Rev. 73: 891.

Beshara, Robert K. 2021. “Ten Concepts for Critical Psychology Praxis.” In Critical Psychology Praxis, Pps.17-27. Routledge.

Bonilla, Yarimar, and Jonathan Rosa. 2015. “# Ferguson: Digital Protest, Hashtag Ethnography, and the Racial Politics of Social Media in the United States.” American Ethnologist 42 (1): 4–17.

Burgess, H, D Cormack, and P Reid. 2021. “Calling Forth Our Pasts, Citing Our Futures: An Envisioning of a Kaupapa Mãori Citational Practice.” MAI Journal. A New Zealand Journal of Indigenous Scholarship10 (1): 57–67. https://doi.org/DOI: 10.20507/MAIJournal.2021.10.1.8.

Chick, Nancy L., Christopher Ostrowdun, Sophia Abbot, Lucy Mercer-Mapstone, and Krista Grensavitch. 2021. “Naming Is Power: Citation Practices in SoTL.” Teaching & Learning Inquiry 9 (2): 1–26. doi:10.20343/teachlearninqu.9.2.2.

Chu, Johan S. G., and James A. Evans. 2021. “Slowed Canonical Progress in Large Fields of Science.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118 (41): e2021636118. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2021636118.

#CiteBlackWomen Collective; Makhulu, Anne-Marie B.; Smith, Christen A.; Harrison, Faye V.; Williams, Bianca C.; Shange, Savannah, “Colloquy [various articles]”, Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 37(2), 2022. [This was published after the course ended and has been subsequently added here and to the Zotero bibliography].

Ciccariello-Maher, George. 2020. “Constructing the Pluriverse: The Geopolitics of Knowledge.” Edited by Bernd Reiter. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. 352p. 27.95 Paper.” Perspectives on Politics18 (3): 942–44.*

Craven, Christa. 2021. “Teaching Antiracist Citational Politics as a Project of Transformation: Lessons from the Cite Black Women Movement for White Feminist Anthropologists.” Feminist Anthropology 2 (1): 120–29. https://doi.org/10.1002/fea2.12036.

Das, Sonia N. 2021. “Shadow Conversations and the Citational Practices of a Journal.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 31 (3): 335–39.

Davis, Dána-Ain, and Sameena Mulla. 2021. “Editors’ Welcome.” Feminist Anthropology 2 (1): 5–5.

Earhart, Amy E, Roopika Risam, and Matthew Bruno. 2021. “Citational Politics: Quantifying the Influence of Gender on Citation in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities.” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 36 (3): 581–94.

Flaherty, Mary. 2001. “How a Language Gender System Creeps into Perception.” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 32 (1): 18–31.

Gilbert, Scott F, and Anne Fausto-Sterling. 2003. “Educating for Social Responsibility: Changing the Syllabus of Developmental Biology.” International Journal of Developmental Biology 47 (2–3): 237–44.

Hassel, Craig A. 2014. “Reconsidering Nutrition Science: Critical Reflection with a Cultural Lens.” Nutrition Journal 13 (1): 1–11.

Hayat, Norrinda Brown. 2021. “Freedom Pedagogy: Toward Teaching Antiracist Clinics.” Clinical L. Rev. 28: 149.

Jacob-Owens, Timothy Craig, and Max Münchmeyer. 2021. “United for Diversity?: Peer Review and the Politics of Citation.” European Journal of Legal Studies 13 (2): 1–8. https://doi.org/doi:10.2924/EJLS.2021.001.

Jia, Xiwen, Allyson Lynch, Yuheng Huang, Matthew Danielson, Immaculate Lang’at, Alexander Milder, Aaron E Ruby, Hao Wang, Sorelle A Friedler, and Alexander J Norquist. 2019. “Anthropogenic Biases in Chemical Reaction Data Hinder Exploratory Inorganic Synthesis.” Nature 573 (7773): 251–55.

Kwon, Diana. 2022. “Citational Justice,” Nature (63), p. 568.

Lambert, Cat, and Diana Newby. 2021. “Introduction: Progressive Pedagogies for Humanities Research and Citation.” Teaching Citational Practice: Critical Feminist Approaches 1. https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/citationalpractice/article/view/8659.

Liboiron, Max. 2021. Pollution Is Colonialism. Duke University Press.*

MacLeod, Lorisia. “More Than Personal Communication: Templates For Citing Indigenous Elders and Knowledge Keepers.” KULA: Knowledge Creation, Dissemination, and Preservation Studies 5, no. 1 (2021): 1-5.

Mariner, K.A. 2022. Citation. Feminist Anthropology.

Martinez-Cruz, Paloma. 2011. Women and Knowledge in Mesoamerica: From East LA to Anahuac. University of Arizona Press.*

Mattner, Cosima. 2021. “Critiquing the Syllabus: Inviting Student Assessment of Standardized Curricula.” Teaching Citational Practice: Critical Feminist Approaches 1.

McKittrick, Katherine. 2021. Dear Science and Other Stories. Duke University Press.*

Mott, Carrie, and Daniel Cockayne. 2017. “Citation Matters: Mobilizing the Politics of Citation toward a Practice of ‘Conscientious Engagement.’” Gender, Place & Culture 24 (7): 954–73. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2017.1339022.

Noble, Safiya Umoja. 2018. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York University Press.*

Poole, Monica C. 2021. “Feminist Epistemologies.” Introduction to Philosophy: Epistemology. https://press.rebus.community/intro-to-phil-epistemology/chapter/feminist-epistemologies/.

Prescod-Weinstein, Chanda. 2020. “Making Black Women Scientists under White Empiricism: The Racialization of Epistemology in Physics.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 45 (2): 421–47. https://doi.org/10.1086/704991.

———. 2021. The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred. Hachette UK.*

Smith, Christen A. 2021. “An Introduction to Cite Black Women.” Feminist Anthropology 2 (1): 6–9. https://doi.org/10.1002/fea2.12050.


Smith, Christen A, Erica L Williams, Imani A Wadud, NL Whitney, and Cite Black Women Collective. 2021. “Cite Black Women: A Critical Praxis (A Statement).” Feminist Anthropology 2 (1): 10–17. https://doi.org/10.1002/fea2.12040.


Smith, Christen A, and Dominique Garrett‐Scott. 2021. “‘We Are Not Named’: Black Women and the Politics of Citation in Anthropology.” Feminist Anthropology. https://doi.org/10.1002/fea2.12038.

Reiter, Bernd. 2021. “Decolonizing the Social Sciences and Humanities: An Anti-Elitism Manifesto.”*

Thomas, Cathy. 2021. “Reverberations of the Black Feminist Breathing Chorus: An Interview with Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Sangodare.” Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture 2 (2): 281–95.

Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization is not a metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, education & society 1, no. 1 (2012).

Williams, Erica L. 2021. “Black Girl Abroad: An Autoethnography of Travel and The Need to Cite Black Women in Anthropology.” Feminist Anthropology. https://doi.org/10.1002/fea2.12041.

Additional Materials (Syllabi, Website, Blogs and other resources):

Guest speakers:

Jill Cirasella’s Presentation is an Open Educational Resource: https://bit.ly/gc-citing-2022

Comments have been turned off for this Page (see Home for information on Comments).

Edit/Delete this Page from Dashboard > Pages