In my course rotation, I typically teach my introduction to Health Humanities and Disability Studies, Literature, Medicine, and Culture, at least once a year. Part of the work of the survey is to expose students to the evolving methodologies in these fields, as well as to the multitude of primary texts often understudied or studied anew. With a “methods” requirement as part of our major in English, students are encouraged to take “methods” courses like mine in their second year to help prepare them for more advanced courses. Aside from modeling how and why we read as health humanists and scholars of disability history and culture, I have begun to consciously think through the multiple ways students enter into conversation with fields that are themselves constantly negotiating what their objects and commitments actually are. One of those ways is the work of citation, which I have come to realize has been taught so reductively and punitively that its politics and ethical practice have mostly been sidelined to great detriment to students’ intellectual formations.
As many scholars have already noted, students are often introduced to citation via boilerplate academic integrity policies and the alarmist red flags surrounding plagiarism: “Everybody cites. Much of our formation in citation takes the form of learning what not to cite.”[i] Because “we have been teaching from a place of compliance and fear—fear of plagiarizing, fear of losing points on technicalities,” students view citation as a mostly tedious exercise of CYA (“covering your ass”).[ii] Yet, I think introducing students early on in their careers to what Richard Delgado originally termed the “politics of citation” challenges them to consider what other work citation does (and does not do) and how politicized that work always already is (even as it is imagined as political).[iii] This involves demonstrating repeatedly over the semester the material conditions of academic work and “how citations honor intellectual property, demonstrate the iterative and relational nature of scholarship, demonstrate value as academic currency (e.g., as seen in tenure and promotion processes), and lend credibility and authority on topics to those cited.”[iv] I have always been troubled by how, in my own academic career, this conversation came as late as graduate school because the tacit assumption was that undergraduates lack the sophistication or need not trouble themselves with the conventions of our profession. Unsurprisingly, I witnessed then and now a mostly extractive and at best virtue signaling approach to citation, which hardly interrogates the very praxis of citation even in work on topics that revolve around such self-reflection. As Naava Smolash has succinctly put it, “intent and perfection aren’t very helpful when an acculturating system is designed to condition you to erase and destroy other people.”[v]
I will never forget a conversation I had with a student who was working on a research project on a historical novel that represents disability in all the predictable and reductive narratively prosthetic ways that David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder have described.[vi] She came across an all-too-familiar genre of secondary source—the retrospective diagnosis of a literary character—and was rightly perplexed at the lack of citations, especially of literary scholars who have written extensively on this canonical work. To the author’s credit, they had cited a few recent medical studies and a smattering of primary sources like letters or journals penned by the novelist. But for the most part, this physician had mostly disregarded any of the vibrant health humanistic scholarship surrounding this work because they ultimately did not find it necessary to support their diagnostic argument. Historical context, interpretation of literary figures and tropes, all somehow irrelevant.
For scholars in our field, none of this is surprising. Also, to be very clear, this kind of citational neglect goes both ways: health humanists and disability scholars also have a history of failing to engage with relevant scholarship in STEM fields. This is obviously a byproduct of specialization and training such that we tend to narrow our thinking to areas, periods, and objects of study in order to better do deep work with them. Yet, given the interdisciplinary nature of the Health Humanities and Disability Studies and the many people who claim membership in these fields, it is troubling to see how fraught the ethics of interdisciplinarity are at the level of citation.
Sara Ahmed frames citation as one of the most influential practices of disciplinary formation precisely for how it gatekeeps and reifies citational closed loops that define the terms of the field:
I would describe citation as a rather successful reproductive technology, a way of reproducing the world around certain bodies…These citational structures can form what we call disciplines… The reproduction of a discipline can be the reproduction of these techniques of selection, ways of making certain bodies and thematics core to the discipline, and others not even part.
…
We are not just talking about citation within academic contexts. We are talking about what I think of as screening techniques: how certain bodies take up spaces by screening out the existence of others. If you are screened out (by virtue of the body you have) then you simply do not even appear or register to others.[vii]
What the retrospective diagnosis piece reveals is the way that scholars claim membership in fields also involves routinely participating in and shaping what Ahmed names as its implicit (or sometimes disturbingly explicit) “techniques of selection.” What this physician has signaled in their citation practice is that Health Humanities scholarship can in fact be achieved without the humanities at all and that the expertise of humanists is ultimately not necessary for the discipline to progress. (The number of times I have heard non-humanists say that it does not require special training to “read a book” or “analyze a poem” is staggering). To insist that the value of one’s position is inherent —in this case, being an esteemed physician—takes for granted the right to “take up space” if it inadvertently “screens out the existence of others.” Whose work does not merit recognition? Who does this scholar not see as a peer and interlocutor? Unfortunately, to echo Annabel L. Kim, “citation incites citation, which incites citation, which incites citation.” Every piece and its citations set a precedent for what gets to matter, who gets to be part of the conversation, who will be left out, and ultimately naturalizes those priorities and exclusions.
Most recently, Christen A. Smith’s global campaign, Cite Black Women, has exposed the deep imbrication of citation, prestige, and power in the academy.[viii] By foregrounding the labor and rich intellectual traditions of Black women, Black feminist citational practices refuse to accept the limited imagination of who shapes a field and its directions—they enact a “crucial form of reparations and redress that undoes institutional logics through insisting on making seen and seeable Black women’s work,” all part of the urgent work of “unforgetting” in a deeply amnesiac academic landscape.[ix] As I think about how the movement and campaign have challenged scholars to radically rethink knowledge production and its violent erasures (that are features rather than anomalies in our current citational practices), I am left contemplating how my own fields have reproduced such erasures and even trained its practitioners to erase and then disavow that fact. If “citational politics are the rules, practices, beliefs, and principles by which we determine how we publicly map the genealogy of our thoughts and inspiration,” citational justice for the Health Humanities and Disability Studies demands a much more expansive genealogy and acknowledgment of thinking that exceeds the academy itself “as a way of undoing past and ongoing epistemic violence.”[x] The overemphasis and commodification of interdisciplinarity has often allowed our field to avoid this work when in fact many of us are indebted to others we do not even know about because they cannot access our circuits of citation. If “citation is how we acknowledge our debt to those who came before; those who helped us find our way when the way was obscured because we deviated from the paths we were told to follow,” we cannot begin to do ethical scholarship, let alone claim our scholarship matters without acknowledging this debt we have accrued.[xi] And this citational debt is not to our detriment; rather than citation “as a site of accruing intellectual capital where the rich get richer and the stars get brighter while the precariat writing against erasure gets forgotten and poorer,” citation can be instead “a jubilee that levels the fields in which we right so that we might accrue an extravagant set of debts resulting not in intellectual bondage but in intellectual freedom.”[xii]
I still find myself perplexed when I receive feedback during peer review that I “overcite” or “bury my argument too much in the work of others.” What those preoccupied with novelty, antagonism, and individualism mistake as citational excess might instead be reframed as a refusal to “reproduce so uncannily the capitalistic structures that we, as practitioners of citation, are often eager to critique.”[xiii] Following the lead of Black feminist thinkers who practice citation as iterative and incremental worldbuilding—citation as a “map of a process, not the map of a territory”—I want to cite my way toward communities of care that acknowledge the contributions of their members, past, present, and future. I want our collective citational work to be as Lori Weight, Neisha Wiley, Elizabeth VanWassenhove, Brandelyn Tosolt, Rae Loftis, and Meg L. Hensley describe it: “care-full (that is, full of care)” rituals that honor and remember all those who made our thinking possible, so that we may continue to think boldly.[xiv]
[i] Annabel L. Kim, “The Politics of Citation.” Diacritics 48.3 (2020): 4.
[ii] Liz Chenevey, “Teaching the politics of citation: challenging students’ perceptions.” College & Research Libraries News. 84.5 (2023): 151.
[iii] See “The Imperial Scholar”: Reflections on a Review of Civil Rights Literature.” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 132.2 (1984): 561-78.
[iv] Chenevey 154.
[v] “Notes Toward a Politics of Citation.” ESC: English Studies in Canada 44.4 (2018): 27.
[vi] Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000.
[vii] “Making Feminist Points,” feministkilljoys, September 11, 2013: https://feministkilljoys.com/2013/09/11/making-feminist-points/.
[viii] “An Introduction to Cite Black Women.” Feminist Anthropology 2 (2021): 6-9.
[ix] Jennifer C. Nash, “Citational Desires: On Black Feminism’s Institutional Longings.” Diacritics 48.3 (2020): 81.
[x] Christen A. Smith, Dominique Garrett-Scott, “‘We are not named’: Black women and the politics of citation in anthropology.” Feminist Anthrpology 2(2021): 20; Nash 81.
[xi] Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, Durham: Duke University Press, 15-16.
[xii] Kim 9.
[xiii] Kim 7.
[xiv] “Feminist Citational Practice and Problems of Practice.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 50.3/4 (2022): 131.
