PDF of Dr. Hua's Article | Dr. Hua's Reflection
The Citation Initiative: Leveraging an Expansive Approach to Citation to Develop Anti-Racist Pedagogy and Practice
Written by Linh Hua, Ph.D.
When you think of social justice, does citation practice ever come to mind? There are reasons why it should. Structurally, the self-referential nature of citation practice results in reinforcement of long-standing race, class, gender, colonial, and print biases. Nowadays, computer algorithms exacerbate the problem by presenting search results in seeming natural order. But how does this make citation a social justice issue that is relevant to faculty?
- Citation as honoring. Discussions of citation as technical skill or as a safeguard against plagiarism seldom inspires good research. The question of whether citation is a political act or a social justice issue asks students to think about how sources appear in front of them. I challenge students to find sources that are important to them, guided by the principle that what we read and who we cite impacts our knowledge archive and shapes how we engage with the world and with each other. Who will you honor and why?
- Citation in syllabi. We give careful thought to the texts on our syllabi, many of which we studied as students ourselves. As an important principle of anti-racist and inclusive pedagogy, such precedence ought to be carefully reviewed. Centering scholarship that disrupts disciplinary canon allows the syllabus to belong to our students rather than to us. In this way, citation can be future-inflected.
- Citation as collaborative pedagogy. In 2021, with the support of an LMU Inclusive Excellence Grant, I was able to expand my pedagogy of citation into The Citation Initiative. The Initiative drew on two years of successful teaching and programming for the core as the foundation for piloting a shared curricular unit across three courses in three disciplines. The collaboration among faculty in women’s studies, management, and rhetorical arts, culminated in a campus roundtable and keynote that foregrounded a discussion of citation and Black Indigenous Garifuna women’s ereba-making in Honduras within an International Relations framework.
- Citation as critical conversation. A limited number of stipends is available for faculty and staff interested in participating in three Faculty-Staff Critical Reading Sequences (F-SCRS) scheduled for 2022. To participate in the reading sequences or to build a shared curricular unit for Spring 2023 with colleagues outside of your discipline, please contact Linh Hua (Linh.Hua@lmu.edu).
Ahmed, Sara. “Introduction: Bringing Feminist Theory Home.” Living a Feminist Life. Duke University Press, 2017, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11g9836.
Delgado, Richard. “The Imperial Scholar: Reflections on a Review of Civil Rights Literature.” University of Pennsylvania Law Review, vol. 132, no. 3, The University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 1984, pp. 561–78, https://doi.org/10.2307/3311882.
Delgado, Richard. “The Imperial Scholar Revisited: How to Marginalize Outsider Writing, Ten Years Later.” University of Pennsylvania Law Review, vol. 140, no. 4, The University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 1992, pp. 1349–72, https://doi.org/10.2307/3312406.
duCille, Ann. “The Occult of True Black Womanhood: Critical Demeanor and Black Feminist Studies.” Signs, vol. 19, no. 3, University of Chicago Press, 1994, pp. 591–629, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3174771.
Lorde, Audre. “An Open Letter to Mary Daly.” 1979. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Crossing Press, 2007. http://electra.lmu.edu:2048/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=739170&site=ehost-live&scope=site&ebv=EK&ppid=Page-__-39.
Mott, Carrie, and Daniel Cockayne. “Citation Matters: Mobilizing the Politics of Citation toward a Practice of ‘Conscientious Engagement.” Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, vol. 24, no. 7, July 2017, pp. 954-73. http://electra.lmu.edu:2048/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=125901475&site=eds-live&scope=site.
Dr. Linh Hua
Linh earned her Ph.D. in English at the University of California, Irvine, specializing African American and Asian American literary and cultural history, critical theory, and feminist theory. In 2002-2005, she served on the Modern Language Association's Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession and contributed to developing a national survey on women in academia in mid-career, the results of which are published in the journal Profession (2009). Linh is a recipient of African American Review's Joe Weixlmann Prize for her 2011 article, "Reproducing Time, Reproducing History: Love and Black Feminist Sentimentality in Octavia Butler's Kindred.” She has writing appearing in The Feminist Wire (2013), Teaching and Emotion (Jossey-Bass Wiley; 2018), Conditions of the Present (Duke UP; 2018), Mapping Gendered Ecologies (Rowan 2020); and in a forthcoming collection entitled Feminist Collaborations of Radical Interconnectedness. Her current work takes up citation practice as a social justice issue that, at its base, begins with the fundamental premise that who we read and what we cite shapes how we live and lead, fuels how we imagine, and ultimately determines who gets to be free. She heads the Citation Initiative, now heading into its fourth year, for which she was awarded a 2020-21 Inclusive Excellence Grant. Linh is Instructor of Rhetorical Arts for LMU’s core curriculum.