Roundtable
Introduction: “Citation Networks as Antidiscriminatory Practice”
New York University
mmills@nyu.edu
During the Catalyst 5th anniversary symposium, held online, the opening conversation between Donna Haraway and Banu Subramaniam gravitated to the topic of citation in feminist STS: how we “disappear” each other and how to build new fields of thought through citation. From the audience, Zoë Wool typed into the chat, “Hi all—how about we all drop in here the names of folks we would like to see cited more.” A parallel written discussion ensued while Haraway and Subramaniam talked, and dozens of names were suggested. Following up on this provocation, Catalyst is reprinting an excerpt of the dialogue between Haraway and Subramaniam, and we invited some of the audience members to publish their own interviews with the scholars, artists, and activists they nominated: Max Liboiron with Tina Ngata, Firuzeh Shokooh Valle with Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar, Zoë Wool with Marisa Solomon, Loren Britton with Romi Ron Morrison. These conversations span technopolitical resistance as feminist STS, Black geographies and wayward anthropology, algorithmic normativity, and the colonial politics of citation itself.
Citation is a means of recognition and conjuring as well as academic credit. It could be its own bureau in the league of feminist scholarship. Sara Ahmed describes citation as a reproductive technology that is also a screening technique: “a way of reproducing the world around certain bodies” and the way “certain bodies take up spaces by screening out the existence of others” (Ahmed 2013). Power, bias, and theft lurk in the endpages. Quantitative studies of publications, citation rates, and editorial positions in particular fields—like “#CommunicationSoWhite” by Paula Chakravartty, Rachel Kuo, Victoria Grubbs, and Charlton McIlwain—reveal that today, still, “White masculinity [is] the normative core of scholarly inquiry” (Chakravartty et. al. 2018). Even after decades of (too-slow) gains in hiring and publication rates, citation equity requires overt cross-platform campaigns like #CiteBlackWomen, launched in 2017 by anthropologist Christen Smith.
Notes and bibliographies are the architecture of information search, promotion, and syllabus development. Yet even articles that claim Left politics, or cover feminist and queer topics, often rest on the same discriminatory pilings. Groups like the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR) at Memorial University of Newfoundland, directed by Liboiron, have formulated feminist approaches to author order based on consensus (published in Catalyst volume 3, issue 2). CLEAR acknowledges social location as well as forms of labor like care work that mostly don’t get counted within academic hierarchies (Liboiron et. al. 2017).
In this collection of anniversary interviews, Liboiron talks with Ngata about their mutual interest in Indigenous approaches to plastic pollution. They discuss Ngata’s research and collaborative networks in Aotearoa (New Zealand), the colonial underpinnings of intellectual property, and western “alibis for ignorance” about Indigenous expertise. Firuzeh Shokooh Valle and Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar consider the “impoverishment of English-speaking academia” in its “brutal asymmetry” and willful neglect toward most of the world’s scholarship. In their conversation (conducted in Spanish and translated by Vivette García Deister), Gutiérrez Aguilar also talks about being a “late academic” following years of militant activism and incarceration in Bolivia, and the “corseting” she often experiences in the norms of academic writing. Shokooh Valle and Gutiérrez Aguilar share an interest in science and technology as colonial-capitalist “dispossession devices”—while still pursuing strategies of “technopolitical resistance.”
Zoë Wool and Marisa Solomon also take up the themes of trash and dispossession. From the perspective of racial capitalism in the U.S., Solomon traces the valuation and exchange of people and places in her research on waste, gentrification, and salvage in cities. Solomon locates her work within citational networks of Black feminist Marxists and scholars of Black geographies. Citing Sadiya Haartman, she introduces us to “wayward anthropology” as a response to the ongoing colonial impulses in ethnography. Finally, Loren Britton interviews artist-scholar Romi Ron Morrison about their multi-platform project on Black Computational Thought. Morrison enfolds STS, Queer Black Feminist Theory, and Geography into video, installations, and writing in critical data studies. The conversation itself is interrupted by emojis from Mutant.Tech, an anti-corporate and inclusive icon set, offering an exercise in slow reading and a new digital ritual for citation.
References
Ahmed, Sara. 2013. “Making Feminist Points.” Feminist Killjoys blog. Last modified September 11, 2013. Accessed June 22, 2021. https://feministkilljoys.com/2013/09/11/making-feminist-points/.
Chakravartty, Paula, Rachel Kuo, Victoria Grubbs, and Charlton McIlwain. 2018. “#CommunicationSoWhite.” Journal of Communication 68 (2): 254–266.
Liboiron, Max, Justine Ammendolia, Katharine Winsor, Alex Zahara, Hillary Bradshaw, Jessica Melvin, Charles Mather, Natalya Dawe, Emily Wells, France Liboiron, Bojan Fürst, Coco Coyle, Jacquelyn Saturno, Melissa Novacefski, Sam Wescott, and Grandmother Liboiron. 2017. “Equity in Author Order: A Feminist Laboratory’s Approach.” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 3 (2): https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/article/view/28850.
Author Bios
Mara Mills is an Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, where she co-founded and co-directs the NYU Center for Disability Studies. She is a founding editorial board member of Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience.