by Natalie Miller
On Thursday, Sept. 14 The College of Wooster welcomed guest speaker Dr. Christen A. Smith to Gault Recital Hall to discuss citational politics. Dr. Smith is the founder of the #CiteBlackWomen project, an associated professor of anthropology, African and African diaspora studies and the director of the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Makiba J. Foster, one of the librarians at The College of Wooster and a leader in digital projects curated for the Black experience, interviewed Dr. Smith.
Dr. Foster and Dr. Christa Craven, of the College’s anthropology and women’s, gender & sexuality studies departments, worked together with others on campus including Dr. Country Thomas in the African studies department and Cheryl Nuñez in the Center for Diversity and Inclusion in order to facilitate this discussion of Black womens’ contributions to academia. Dr. Craven also thanked the Black Women’s Organization (BWO), a student group on campus, as one of the biggest contributors to this event. The president of BWO, Chamari Abercrombie ’24, introduced the evening’s guests.
The interview started a conversation on the politics of citation within the sphere of social media — specifically, the #BlackTikTokStrike, which was a protest that gained popularity in mid-2021 in which Black creators refused to post new dance choreography to the app. This was in response to the tendency of larger white creators — already favored by TikTok’s algorithm — to reap the financial benefits of using Black creators’ art in their own videos without crediting them, a slight that is only made more insulting by the ease with which videos could be stitched back to the original creators’ videos.
This type of behavior is not exclusive to social media, though. It is also present within academia. Dr. Smith shared her own experience of seeing her words and ideas being used at a conference without being credited. This is what inspired her to create the #CiteBlackWomen project. She wanted to speak out about the way she had been treated in academia and quickly realized how many other Black women wanted to use the project to speak out about their own stories.
In the classroom we often discuss citations in a way that is solely focused on proper formatting and style. This divorces the practice from the humanity of the people whose intellectual contributions citations protect, and undercuts the importance of scholarly works in laying the foundation for new works. Dr. Smith sees citations as a way of building a chain of intellectual discussion that readers can follow across space and time. As we at Wooster continue to work on our independent studies and other academic work, it is important to give a diverse group of voices the credit they deserve in shaping our work and to be critical of others by investigating who shaped theirs.
For those who would like to learn more about the politics of citation, the College’s librarians Elora Agsten and Ian McCullough created a library guide, available online through the College library, to give students a better understanding of why citational practices matter beyond proper formatting and correct citation style.