Citational Justice

How do you choose the works you cite when producing knowledge, and what does that choice entail?

Motivation

Everything we write, especially within academia, is built on work done by other before us. Yet, language barriers, lack of values and guidelines for equitably representing this work, and implicit biases have given space to the marginalization of other forms of knowledge production from within academic contexts. This effectively leaves fields of research and their researchers without the opportunity to engage with diverse literatures and different forms of discovery, evolution and dissemination of knowledge. Questions around citational justice are not new though. You can read more on this in writings by feminist cultural theorist Sara Ahmed , mobilization by the Cite Black Women Collective, the Citational Practices Challenge initiative led by Profs. Eve Tuck, Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández, and Wayne Yang , and the Teaching Citational Practices group among others.

  

This is a highly collaborative initiative, started and led by Prof. Neha Kumar at Georgia Tech and Dr. Naveena Karusala. It focuses on drawing attention to this problem, specifically within HCI-related fields. It also provides resources for researchers to better approach citational practices, building on the great work done by others before us. I helped organize and facilitate a series of workshops as part of the Computer-Supported Cooperative Work And Social Computing conference (CSCW), and the Latin American Human-Computer Interaction Conference (LAIHC) in order to invite reflections from researchers across various geographies and disciplines. Together, under the pen name “Citational Justice Collective”, wrote reflection pieces for the XRDS magazine, and the ACM Interactions journal. Prof. Kumar and Dr. Karusala have also written on this for the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems and in public pieces.
 

Contributions

Qualitative data analysis, workshop design and facilitation.

Collaborators

Citational Justice Collective

Press

* Kwon, D. (2022). The rise of citational justice: How scholars are making references fairer. Nature, 603(7902), 568-571.

Resources

Citational Justice in HCI 

Outputs

Ogan, A., van Amstel, F., León, G. M., Maestre, J. F., Williams, K., Bidwell, N. J., Reynolds-Cuéllar, P., Savage, S., Oswal, S., & Sharma, V. (2023). Why Do We Need to Learn about Citational Practices? Recognizing Knowledge Production from the Global Souths and Beyond. XRDS: Crossroads, The ACM Magazine for Students, 29(3), 12–17.

Reynolds-Cuéllar, P. & Wong-Villacrés, M. (2022). Citas Como Tecnología: Un Perjuicio a los Comunes. In 4S/ESOCITE 2022, Cholula, México. 

The Citational Justice Collective, Ahmed, S. I., Amrute, S., Bardzell, J., Bardzell, S., Bidwell, N., Dillahunt, T., Gaytán, S., Karusala, N., Kumar, N., Guzmán, R. L., Mustafa, M., Nardi, B., Nathan, L., Parvin, N., Patin, B., Reynolds-Cuéllar, P., … Wong-Villacrés, M. (2022). Citational justice and the politics of knowledge production. Interactions, 29(5), 78–82.

Collective, C. J., de Castro Leal, D., Molina Leon, G., Maestre, J. F., Williams, K., Wong-Villacres, M., Reynolds-Cuéllar, P. Oswal, S. K., Cerratto Pargman, T., & Sharma, V. (2021). Citational Practices: Interrogating Hegemonic Knowledge Structures in Computing Research in Latin America. X Latin American Conference on Human Computer Interaction, 1–6.

Collective, C. J., Molina León, G., Kirabo, L., Wong-Villacres, M., Karusala, N., Kumar, N., Bidwell, N., Reynolds-Cuéllar, P., Borah, P. P., Garg, R., Oswal, S. K., Chuanromanee, T., & Sharma, V. (2021). Following the Trail of Citational Justice: Critically Examining Knowledge Production in HCI. Companion Publication of the 2021 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, 360–363.