Citation

In addition to how to correctly cite your sources, it's important to consider who you're citing and why. It's just as important to consider who you're not citing and why. This section of the Citation Help guide is an overview of ethical citation practices and resources to help you think critically about the politics of citation. 

• Citations shape academic disciplines and national canons by including or excluding certain scholarship, and this can often result in excluding or discrediting historically disenfranchised scholarship and knowledge.
• Explore the resources to below to learn about the feminist campaign to diversify citations, initiatives to #CiteBlackWomen, and challenges to decolonize your bibliography.
• Navigate to Reed Citation Challenge to challenge yourself to cite specific scholars or areas of scholarship that you have not cited before.
• Read the page on Referencing to dive in deeper about not only who you are citing, but how you are citing them. (Hint: avoid name dropping!)

This page is an overview of existing resources about citation practices and a guide for how to think about what it means to cite your sources ethically. For more information about the ethical use of images, see the anthropology research guide. 

How do we know what we know?

"Canon building is empire building. Canon defense is national defense. Canon debate, whatever the terrain, nature, and range (of criticism, of history, of the history of knowledge, of the definition of language, the universality of aesthetic principles, the sociology of art, the humanistic imagination), is the clash of cultures. And all of the interests are vested." [1]

[1]  Toni Morrison, “Black Matter(s),” in The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019).

"We have been producing knowledge since we blessed this earth. We theorize, we innovate, we revolutionize the world." [4]

Founded in 2017 by Christen Smith, the Cite Black Women Collective is a public campaign to encourage academics to #CiteBlackWomen. On social media, on their podcast, and in their grassroots initiatives, the members of the collective work to advance the intellectual contributions of Black women that have been forgotten, erased, or overlooked. Their work follows five guiding principles.

1. Read Black women's work
2. Integrate Black women into the CORE of your syllabus (in life & in the classroom)
3. Acknowledge Black women's intellectual production
4. Make space for Black women to speak
5. Give Black women the space and time to breathe

What You Can Do

• Integrate these guiding principles into your research and scholarship
• Follow @citeblackwomen on social media and participate in #CiteBlackWomenSunday
• Buy #CiteBlackWomen T-shirts to support grassroots initiatives such as the Winnie Mandela School

[4]  Christen A. Smith, “Cite Black Women: A Critical Praxis,” Cite Black Women, December 21, 2018, https://www.citeblackwomencollective.org/our-praxis.html.