Templin, C. (2022) ‘Why Citation matters: Ideas on a feminist approach to research – Blog ABV Gender- & Diversitykompetenz’, Freie Universitat Berlin, . Available at: https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/abv-gender-diversity/2022/01/10/why-citation-matters-ideas-on-a-feminist-approach-to-research/ (Accessed: Dec 29, 2023).
I really looked forward to reading about citational justice. I have heard my colleagues talking about it and have never got into this subject any deeper before myself. As librarians we help our students a lot with how to reference, and often we need to start with an explanation why we actually do cite. This article gave me lots of food for thought on how I can approach this subject in the future.
The ‘Why should we care’ part of the blog was particularly interesting to me. The author shares her own experience of finding materials for her essay and realising that a lot of what she was finding “was written by white (male) scholars, who are rarely directly affected by the oppressive system in which they work.” She feels that by searching the writings by feminist scholars of colour, she benefited herself by getting a different perspective on her topic. I found it very inspiring and started paying more attention to who I am including in my bibliography. I did not go as far as Sarah Ahmed in her ‘Living a feminist life’ book, where she decided to cite women only, but definitely went for the materials written by women when having a choice between a few articles or books on the topic I am researching. I will see the results when I compile my bibliography at the end of the project.
Kwon, D. (2022) ‘The rise of citational justice: how scholars are making references fairer’, Nature, 603(7902), pp. 568-571. doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-00793-1
It was a very engaging reading. It made me think further about my role as a librarian and ways in which I can participate in reducing inequities in citations.
It was encouraging to learn what is already being done to address these inequalities. However, it was also shocking that some scholars are met with a backlash when they involved in citational justice. I think it was greatly described in the article here:
“Outright racist or sexist comments — such as “white people or men just write better papers” — are rare, but people often say that they just cite good science or that they don’t see race or gender. These arguments are problematic (…) because they indicate that people are not actively trying to address their own explicit and implicit biases — or that they are not willing to dig more deeply into the literature in their field to diversify their citations.” p.571.