Who get’s cited and who doesn’t? Who should get cited? As Chick, Ostrowdun, Abbot, Mercer-Mapstone & Grensavitch 2021 state: “Citing is a political act. It is a practice that can work both sides of the same coin: it can give voice, and it can silence.” I came across this paper as a chance discovery while searching for something else, but it made me think. How concious am I about the choices I make in who or what to cite?
My typical literature search process can be a little unstructured. I will search on google scholar using hopefully relevant key words and I’ll follow a thread of relevant papers cited by or cited in papers of interest. Rarely do I consider who the authors are or where they are coming from. Chick, Ostrowdun, Abbot, Mercer-Mapstone & Grensavitch 2021 explore citation practices within the SoTL community, asking colleagues to be explicit about citation decisions they make. Top ranked principles for citing sources were reputation of the source or that the work is considered ‘canon’. When following these principles, the field becomes an echo chamber with only certain voices heard.
SoTL is by its very nature a wide and diverse field. Yet the majority of published, or frequently cited, scholarship seems to be from a rather narrow geographical area, predominantly UK, North America, and Australia. I found a similar bias when exploring literature in the very different field of agricultural greenhouse gas emissions, though perhaps for somewhat different reasons.
Despite, or perhaps because of, these publication biases some respondents in Chick, Ostrowdun, Abbot, Mercer-Mapstone & Grensavitch 2021 declared making a concious, and political, choice to diversify the choice of scholars they cited. This echoes a much wider push to decolonise curricula and broaden horizons in all disciplines. My own motivation to do so has been developing content and reading lists for a new online module with a global audience and a global perspective. Knowing where to look or how to find relevant papers is challenging, I am often relying on chance discoveries. As an aside, I looked for my own most recent paper on google scholar out of curiousity recently and couldn’t find it. This made me think who or what else I might be missing! Still, with some persistence I have been able to discover interesting and useful scholarship from a wide range of countries and higher education contexts. And each new discovery opens up a new pool of potential citations and further discoveries.
In the push for diversifying our citation or reading lists and to expand the range of voices heard, Chick, Ostrowdun, Abbot, Mercer-Mapstone & Grensavitch 2021 also make a point about race or gender diversity of the authors we cite. They suggest we need to self-assess, to research the authors present and more fully know the people we cite. This can be challenging. You certainly can’t know much about author identity just from the name. My own name being a good case in point. If you are in Norway, you would assume I’m a woman. If you are in the English speaking world, you would assume I’m a man. But does it even matter which assumption is right? Another recommendation by Chick, Ostrowdun, Abbot, Mercer-Mapstone & Grensavitch 2021 is to read widely and curiously. The more you read, the harder it would be to take the time to research each author in order to know more about their positionality. Perhaps we need to get better at explicitly positioning ourselves within our own research, rather than leaving it up to the reader to assume, guess or research?
Chick, Ostrowdun, Abbot, Mercer-Mapstone & Grensavitch 2021 provide 10 principles of inclusive citation practices in their paper. Although none of these principles are necessarily easy to follow, they provide good justification for why we should strive to do so. There are no simple solutions, it will require concious thought, negotiation and deliberation. On reflection, I will do my best to cite more intentionally, to read as widely and diversely as I can, and hopefully to improve my citation practices over time to be more inclusive though I make no promises that I will ge it right!
These thoughts/ideas percolated as I prepared the content for one particular unit of a new online course. Here is the full reading list for that unit as it currently stands. If you have further suggestions or recommendations, I would love to hear it:
- Behari-Leak (2020) Toward a borderless, decolonized, socially just, and inclusive scholarship of teaching and learning. Teaching and Learning Inquiry, 8(1), 4-23 https://journalhosting.ucalgary.ca/index.php/TLI/article/download/69848/53912
- Chick et al. (2021) Naming is power: citation practices in SoTL. Teaching and Learning Inquiry, 9(2), https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1314759
- Leibowitz (2017) The significance of SoTL in the South. SoTL in the South, 1(1), 1-3, https://www.sotl-south-journal.net/index.php/sotls/article/download/7/1
DrSaetnan's musings 