Doctoral writing and the politics of citation use
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31468/dwr.969Keywords:
doctoral writing, citation use, citation practices, politics of citationsAbstract
Conventions shape scholarly writing and citations practices are one set of conventions that dominate how and what we write. Yet, many of these practices naturalize exclusion and discrimination in a way that becomes normalized and, consequently, invisible. For doctoral students, learning the conventions of citing is part of developing an identity around scholarship, research and writing. In this paper, we examine our own experiences of the politics of citations to understand our socialization processes and resistances. We use an autoethnographic narrative approach to frame this qualitative study. Our findings show how citation use abounds with the contradictions and paradoxes in our doctoral writing journeys where the pressure to succeed can compromise identity-building as ethical scholars. Each of us has many needs and multiple positionalities and resisting the naturalizing grammar of citations can be complicated. Yet, once aware of the politics of citations, one cannot go back to being unaware.
References
Ahmed, S. (2012). On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional life. Duke University Press.
Ahmed, S. (2013). Making feminist points. FeministKilljoys blog. Accessed 17/05/2021: http://feministkilljoys.com/2013/09/11/making-feminist-points/
Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble. Routledge.
Canagarajah, S. (2002). The geopolitics of academic writing. University of Pittsburgh Press.
Chakravartty, P., Kuo, R., Grubbs, V., & Mdlwain, C. (2018). #CommunicationSoWhite. Journal of Communication, 68, 254-266.
Clark, M.C., & Dirkx, J.M. (2008). The emotional self in adult learning. New Directions for Adult and Continuing Learning, 120, 89-95.
Corcoran, J. (2019). Addressing the “bias gap”: A research-driven argument for critical support of plurilingual scientists’ research writing. Written Communication, 36(4), 538–577. https://doi.org/10.1177/0741088319861648
Corcoran, J. & Englander, K. (2016). A proposal for critical-pragmatic pedagogical approaches to English for research publication purposes, Publications, 4(6), 1-10. doi:10.3390/publications4010006. www.mdpi.com/journal/publications
De Oliveira Andreotti, V., Stein, S., Shenakew, C., & Hunt, D. (2015). Mapping interpretations of decolonization in the context of higher education. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 4(1), 21-40.
Earhart, A. E., Risam, R., & Bruno, M. (2020). Citational politics: Quantifying the influence of gender in citation. In Digital scholarship and the humanities. Digital Scholarship and the Humanities, 1-14.
Emmioğlu, E., McAlpine, L., & Amundsen, C. (2017). Doctoral students' experiences of feeling (or not) like an academic. International Journal of Doctoral Studies, 12, 73-91.
Felder, P. P., Stevenson, H. C., & Gasman, M. (2014). Understanding race in doctoral student socialization. International Journal of Doctoral Studies, 9, 21-43.
Flores, N., & Rosa, J. (2015). Undoing appropriateness: Raciolinguistic ideologies and language diversity in education. Harvard Educational Review, 85(2), 149-171.
Frank, A. (2010). Letting stories breathe. University of Chicago Press.
Garvis, S. (2015). Narrative constellations: Exploring lived experience in education. Sense Publishers.
Guyotte, K.W., & Sochacka, N.W. (2016). Is this research? Productive tensions in living the (collaborative) autoethnographic process. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 15(1), 1-11.
Hart, J., & A. S. Metcalfe (2010). Whose Web of Knowledge™ is it anyway?: Citing feminist research in the field of higher education. The Journal of Higher Education, 81(2), 140-163.
Hyland, K. (2008). Persuasion, interaction and the construction of knowledge: Representing self and others in research writing. International Journal of English Studies 8(2), 8–18.
Lillis, T. (1997). New voices in academia? The regulative nature of academic writing conventions. Language and Education, 11(3), 182-199.
Lovitts, B. (2001). Leaving the ivory tower: The causes and consequences of departure from doctoral study. Rowman & Littlefield.
Mantai, L. (2019). “A source for sanity”: The role of social support for doctoral candidates’ belonging and becoming. International Journal of Doctoral Studies, 14, 367-382. https://doi.org/10.28945/4275
Merriam, S. B., & Tisdell, E. J. (2016). Qualitative research: A guide to design and implementation. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Mott, C., & Cockayne, D. (2017). Citation matters: Mobilizing the politics of citation toward a practice of “conscientious engagement”. Gender, Place & Culture, 24(7), 954-973. DOI: 10.1080/0966369X.2017.1339022.
Müller, M. (2021). Worlding geography: From linguistic privilege to decolonial anywhere. Progress in Human Geography, 1-27. DOI: 10.1177/0309132520979356
Paré, A. (2009). What we know about writing and why it matters. Compendium2: Writing, Teaching, and Learning in the University, 2(1). https://ojs.library.dal.ca/C2/article/view/3720/3408
Paré, A. (2019). Re-writing the doctorate: New contexts, identities, and genres. Journal of Second Language Writing, 43, 80–84. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2018.08.004
Paré, A., Starke-Meyerring, D., & McAlpine, L. (2011). Knowledge and identity work in the supervision of doctoral student writing: Shaping rhetorical subjects (pp. 215-236). In D. Starke-Meyerring, A. Paré, M. Horne, N. Artemeva, & L. Yousoubova (Eds.), Writing in knowledge societies. The WAC Clearinghouse and Parlor Press. Available at http://wac.colostate.edu/books/winks/
Pearse, R., Hitchcock, J. N., & Keane, H. (2019). Gender, inter/disciplinarity and marginality in the social sciences and humanities: a comparison of six disciplines. Women’s Studies International Forum, 72, 109–26.
Poe, M. (2022, in press). Learning to unlearn the teaching and assessment of academic writing. Discourse and Writing/Rédactologie, 32.
Prior, P. & Bilbro, R. (2012). Academic enculturation: Developing literate practices and disciplinary identities. In M. Castelló & C. Donahue (Eds.), University writing: Selves and texts in academic (pp. 19-31). Bingley, UK: Emerald.
Riessman, C. (2008). Narrative methods for the human sciences. Los Angeles: Sage.
Roksa, J., Feldon, D. F., & Maher, M. (2018). First-generation students in pursuit of the PhD: Comparing socialization experiences and outcomes to continuing-generation peers. The Journal of Higher Education, 1-25.
Ruttan, L. (2004). Siting the literature review: Dialogues on the location of literature. American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 28(3), 103-120.
Smith, L.T. (2012). Decolonizing methodologies. Zed Books
Thieme, K., & Saunders, M.A.S. (2018). How do you wish to be cited? Citation practices and a scholarly community of care in trans studies research articles. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 32, 80-90.
Thompson, C., & Pennycook, A. (2010). A question of dialogues: Authorship, authority, plagiarism. Education Canada, 48(3), 20-23.
Todd, Z. (2016). An Indigenous feminist’s take on the ontological turn: ‘Ontology’ is just another word for colonialism. Journal of Historical Sociology, 29(1), 4-22.
Tuck, E., Yang, W. & Gaztambide-Fernandez (n.d.). Citation Practices Challenge. Tumblr. https://citationpractices.tumblr.com/
Younging, G. (2018). Element of Indigenous style: A guide for writing by and about Indigenous peoples. Brush.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2022 Cecile Badenhorst, Arif, Kelvin
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
If this article is selected for publication in Discourse and Writing/Rédactologie, the work shall be published electronically under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA 4.0). This license allows users to adapt and build upon the published work, but requires them to attribute the original publication and license their derivative works under the same terms. There is no fee required for submission or publication. Authors retain unrestricted copyright and all publishing rights, and are permitted to deposit all versions of their paper in an institutional or subject repository.
