Politics of Citation, Revealing Systems Of Exclusivity
| Sal Hamerman, David Isaac Hecht, Dan Taeyoung, Charles Eppley, Sam Hart, Melanie Hoff | 2018 |
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Description
“Revealing Systems of Exclusion,” is an interactive library installation that considers how biases perpetuate through library systems of indexing and authorial citation practices. The Library assembled a subcollection of about 100 items (of the 1000+ in our main collection) that reflect the themes from ACH conference panels and papers. These books and topics will serve as the basis for an interactive citation practice analysis activity. By browsing, reading, and analyzing our collection together, we hope to activate a network of shared ideas and research that points toward equitable citation praxis.
Specifically, we hope to highlight how citation functions to tether one’s intellectual production to established sets of voices and sources, and how these sets embody or circumscribe disciplines. Citation practices, and how they are valorized by the scholarly publishing industry, create a feedback loop that reifies existing canons. As Sarah Ahmed argues, citation is a “reproductive technology, a way of reproducing the world around certain bodies.” The proliferation of informal agreements between authors to cite one another’s work (otherwise referred to as “citation cartels”), or to not reference marginalized scholars or ideas thoughtfully, if at all, enforces exclusionary norms of citational practice and scholarship.
Our installation -- and The Cybernetics Library in general -- seeks to reveal exclusionary citational practices within the items in our collection. We hope to imagine how an equitable -- perhaps non-institutional -- form of citation practice might look… a citation practice that…
- amplifies marginalized voices
- makes implicit power structures visible
- validates personal input over rigid structure
- nourishes relationships rather than name-checking
- is qualitative rather than solely quantitative
- decolonizes scholarly and disciplinary thinking
- examines the politics of citation and the index
- embraces activism and social justice
- makes visible the social life and context of information
- and what else?