#decolonizing research

Fall, a season of change and transformation, both in classrooms and outside. 

What better time to start thinking through radical transformation by thinking critically about the politics that are embedded in who we choose to cite, how we choose to cite, and how or who we refuse to cite?

Today’s post considers Patrick Dunleavy’s writing about the politics of and social importance of academic citation practices. According to Dunleavy, citations and references are about more than giving credit, but they also influence how your colleagues regard your work. He carefully lists seven things that citations do:

1.    “Specify sources for assumptions and their contextual legitimacy, and to contextualise arguments within a defined field

2.    set up a specialist discourse in an economical and highly-focused manner, and to show how the relevant literature defines concepts, terms or notations

3.    show that the author has read the relevant literature and has a good understanding of it

4.    guide readers seeking to follow the author’s extended chain of reasoning. Readers should be able to understand and “replay” the intellectual journey involved

5.    accurately assign credit to other researchers for key innovations and relevant prior findings or arguments, so that readers can also access this work for themselves

6.    allow readers to quickly find and precisely check sources of evidence or other tokens for themselves.

7.    show that the author has comprehensively surveyed work that is relevant in scope, approach and recency, and to specifically point out consistencies and inconsistencies between other work and the author’s own findings”

I find these seven points quite helpful for clarifying the importance of citations and references, and agree with them. BUT I can’t help but feel uneasy by his overall argument that, “it is simply unacceptable scientific or academic behaviour now to ignore immediately relevant research or argument already in the public domain just because it does not help your case, or suit your style of work, or comes from a different discipline.”

I believe that our citations and research do not take place in a sociological and ahistorical vacuum. Our projects don’t begin from a position of social and political neutrality. Western academic research, particularly in the social sciences and humanities, has a long lineage of problematic conversations that have justified and conditioned imperialistic expansion, capitalistic labor exploitation, racism, patriarchal violence(s), slavery, eugenics, ableism, and colonization (Fanon 1952; Said 1978; Smith 2013; Simpson 2007; Tuck and Yang 2012). I have posted elsewhere, “credibility has a lineage. It has an epistemology. It has a historicity. And most of all, it requires power to maintain its credibility” (Cheuk 2017).  How we choose to cite, who we choose to cite in, or cite out, is a political act that holds much potential for both radical transformation, and problematic reproduction.

As the original call-out for the Citation Practices Challenge stated,

“Indeed, our practices of citation make and remake our fields, making some forms of knowledge peripheral. We often cite those who are more famous, even if their contributions appropriate subaltern ways of knowing. We also often cite those who frame problems in ways that speak against us. Over time, our citation practices become repetitive; we cite the same people we cited as newcomers to a conversation. Our practices persist without consideration of the politics of linking projects to the same tired reference lists.” (Gaztambide-Fernandez, Tuck, & Yang 2015)

Citations are political. For radical social transformation we need to be intentional about the conversations that we’re continuing, or choose not to continue. Perhaps we might wonder at how did some conversations become “core” to our fields even if we know them to be problematic or harmful to our communities? And if we decide to continue them, how can we take part in problematic conversations that are considered “core” to our fields in ways that favor transformative theories of change, rather than reproduce it in ways that uphold the status quo?

Thinking with you,

Fi

References:

Cheuk, Fiona. Spring is Coming. Critical Ethnic Studies Journal Blog. 2017

Fanon, Frantz. Black skin, white masks [1952]. Grove press, 2008

Gaztambide-Fernández, Rubén., Tuck, Eve., & Wayne K. Yang. Critical Ethnic Studies Blog Post. (April 2015) http://www.criticalethnicstudiesjournal.org/citation-practices/

Said, Edward. "Orientalism. 1978." New York: Vintage 199 (1979).

Simpson, Audra. "On ethnographic refusal: indigeneity,‘voice’and colonial citizenship." Junctures: The Journal for Thematic Dialogue 9 (2007).

Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. Zed Books Ltd., 2013.

Examples of decolonial research methodologies - Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s 25 Indigenous projects:

Claiming

“They teach both the non-indigenous audience and the new generations of Indigenous peoples an official account of their collective story” (p. 144)

Testimonies

“Indigenous testimonies are a way of talking about an extremely painful event or series of events” (p. 144)

Storytelling

“These new stories contribute to a collective story in which every Indigenous person has a place” (p. 144)

Celebrating Survival

“Celebrating survival accentuates not so much our demise but the degree to which Indigenous peoples and communities have successfully retained cultural and spiritual values and authenticity” (p. 145)

Remembering

“Both healing and transformation become crucial strategies in any approach which asks a community to remember what they may have decided unconsciously or consciously to forget” (p. 146)

Indigenizing

“The term centres a politics of Indigenous identity and indigenous cultural action” (p. 146)

Intervening

“Intervening takes action research to mean literally the process of being proactive and of becoming involved as an interested working for change” (p. 147)

Revitalizing

“Indigenous languages, their arts and their cultural practices are in various states of crisis” (p. 147)

Connecting

“Connecting is related to issues of identity and place, to spiritual relationships and community well-being” (p. 149)

Reading

“Critical rereading of Western History and the Indigenous presence in the making of that history has taken on a different impetus from what was once a school curriculum designed to assimilate Indigenous children” (p. 149)

Writing

“Biographies and autobiographies including those which are accounts ‘told to a non-Indigenous person’, are sought after by a new reading audience of Indigenous people” (p. 150)

Representing

“Indigenous communities have struggled since colonization to be able to exercise what is viewed as a fundamental right, that is to represent ourselves” (p. 150)

Gendering

“Gendering Indigenous debates…is concerned with issues related to the relations between Indigenous men and women” (p. 151)

Envisioning

“The confidence of knowing that we have survived and can only go forward provides some impetus to a process of envisioning” (p. 152)

Reframing

“Reframing is about taking much greater control over the ways in which Indigenous issues and social problems are discussed and handled” (p. 153)

Restoring

“Indigenous peoples across the world have disproportionately high rates of imprisonment, suicide and alcoholism” (p. 155)

Returning

“This project intersects with that of claiming. It involves the returning of lands, rivers, and mountains to their Indigenous owners” (p. 155).

Democratizing

“Democratizing in Indigenous terms is a process of extending participation outwards through reinstating principles of collectivity and public debates” (p. 156)

Networking

“Networking a process which Indigenous peoples have used effectively to build relationships and disseminate knowledge and information” (p. 157)

Naming

“This means renaming the world using the original Indigenous names” (p. 157)

Protecting

“This project is…concerned with protecting peoples, communities, languages, customs and beliefs, art ideas, natural resources and the things Indigenous peoples produce” (p. 158)

Creating

“The project of creating is about transcending the basic survival mode through using a resource or capability which every Indigenous community has retained throughout colonization – the ability to create and be creative” (p. 158)

Negotiating

“Negotiating is about thinking and acting strategically…the continued faith in the process of negotiating is about retaining a faith in the humanity of Indigenous beliefs, values and customary practices” (p. 160)

Discovering

“This project is about discovering Western science and technology and making science work for Indigenous development” (p. 160)

Sharing

So far on the citation practices challenge tumblr, we’ve thought through how we cite, who we cite, and the material structures conditioning the possibilities for citing some, but not Others. In this compelling article Alex Zahara, writing from the perspective of Discard Studies, directs our attention to ethnographic refusal as a means of decolonizing research following the intellectual imprints of many decolonizing and indigenous studies scholars (Smith 1999, Zavala 2013, Tuck and Yang 2014).

“Ethnographic refusal is a practice by which researchers and research participants together decide not to make particular information available for use within the academy. Its purpose is not to bury information, but to ensure that communities are able to respond to issues on their own terms. An ethnographic refusal is intended to redirect academic analysis away from harmful pain-based narratives that obscure slow violence, and towards the structures and institutions that engender those narratives. It is a method centrally concerned with a community’s right to self-representation.”

Check it out!

--Fi