Rethinking power and positionality in debates about citation: Towards a recognition of complexity and opacity in academic hierarchies

Abstract

Discussions about epistemic inequalities have for several years highlighted the need to engage critically and reflexively with the politics of citation. Many authors have called for colleagues to correct longstanding epistemic and material injustices by proactively citing scholars and scholarship from marginalised groups, thereby producing radical knowledge that disrupts power. Analysing the epistemic-political grammar of these calls, I note that they often assume that resistance and disruption are intrinsic to corrective citation – i.e. that citing names understood as marginal will by default undermine relations of power. But is that always the case? Drawing on three sets of empirical examples, I demonstrate that citation often does not have the epistemic and material effects we predict, or hope, it will, and may reinforce some inequalities at the same time as it disrupts others. I show that the effects of citation are complex and contingent because they are shaped by unpredictable interactions between different structures of power, unexpected (dis)connections between global and local inequalities, and dynamic relationships between injustice within texts and inequalities beyond them. I argue, therefore, that we must question the more binary and reifying logics of contemporary conceptualisations of citation and attempt to think about corrective citation differently. To contribute to this rethinking, I draw on several authors to propose an approach that celebrates the potential of corrective citation, but remains attentive to its limitations, foregrounding complexity and opacity, recognising the possible failures of radical epistemic practices, and probing our affective investments in them.

This article begins where most articles end: in the list of texts – or people – cited. If you scroll down, or leaf over, to that section now, I hope you consider mine a good list. I hope it looks (and makes me look) knowledgeable, as well as attentive to epistemic inequalities and committed to disrupting them. This last desire is especially significant, because it is not only a value guiding my work but also a key condition of its publication here. According to its editors, The Sociological Review (TSR) seeks articles which ‘promot[e] scholarly practices that address how . . . knowledge production reproduces global inequalities’; this means there is much at stake in who I cite.

My hopes and concerns about citation will, of course, resonate with others. Many scholars working within and beyond Sociology share a similar commitment to using citation to disrupt power, although they might name it differently: decolonising citation, saying ‘other’ names, diversifying canons. Indeed, growing numbers of people, publications and initiatives have, in recent years, grappled with the epistemic-political necessity (and difficulty) of enacting critical citational interventions, whether in writing, speaking, teaching or activism. As debate on citational politics grows and gets institutionalised (namely in journal guidelines like TSR’s), it becomes important to examine the assumptions and effects of this politics. That is what I seek to do here, drawing on literature, ethnographic data, and on informal observations I made while attending academic events or serving as journal editor. First, I examine contemporary calls for critical citation – or, as I call it, corrective citation – and show they tend to overlook three features of academic power relations: the complex interactions between structures of power in academia; the unexpected (dis)connections between global and local academic inequalities; and the messy relationships between (in)justice within texts and inequalities beyond them. Then, I draw on observations from three different sites of academic labour (journal peer review, conference interactions and workplace relations) to show that corrective citation can certainly create ‘revolutionary possibilities’ (Smith, 2021, p. 6), but does not always, or only, have revolutionary effects. I argue that radical investments in corrective citation can sometimes reproduce or mask relations of inequality, especially when they rely on simple and selective accounts of power or are used too assuredly as righteous criteria for academic judgement.

Throughout the article, my focus is on examining how radical interventions unfold, and sometimes unravel, in everyday academic practice. In that focus, I am inspired by recent TSR articles (Fishberg et al., 2023; Puwar, 2020; Roy, 2023) and other texts (e.g. Dotson, 2012; Liu, 2021b; Nash, 2020) which also zoom in on radical epistemic practices to probe their entanglements and limitations. Like many of those authors, I argue that we need to exercise ‘caution’ (Dotson, 2012; Liu, 2021b; Marling, 2021; Nash, 2020; Roy, 2023) to avoid slipping into forms of complacent or ‘simplistic celebration’ (Roy, 2023, p. 1252) that block us from recognising the potential and actual failures of our critical work. I problematise such failures as unavoidable structural ‘potholes’ (Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective, 2021) that we can all potentially trip over (En, 2024), rather than individual oversights of particular scholars. I show that these ‘failures . . . [can] reveal enduring . . . logics and histories’ and ‘offer an alternative route to knowledge production’ (Roy, 2023, p. 1252), enabling moments of ‘dee[p] learning’ about power (GTDF Collective, 2021). I close the paper by drawing on Glissant’s (1997) notion of ‘opacity’ to argue that we must develop approaches to corrective citation that more explicitly recognise, and learn from, their own inevitable failures.

Citing differently: Discourses and desires

For many years, scholars and students have argued that citation of colleagues in marginalised positions is key to tackling epistemic injustice and structural inequalities in academia and society. Calls for attention to, and action on, citation have emerged from different places and taken diverse forms. They have been animated through student-led movements calling for decolonisation of universities and curricula (Bhambra et al., 2018; Mazibuko, 2020). They have been driven by campaigns (Shange, 2022; Smith, 2021) and challenges (Tuck et al., 2015) on social media, and supported by events, websites and podcasts (Bhambra, n.d.; Citational Justice Collective et al., 2023; Smith et al., 2021). They have grown through literature that offers empirical analyses of citation (Hemmings, 2011; Smith & Garrett-Scott, 2021), accounts of experiences of citational erasure (Kilomba, 2020; Smith, 2021; Williams, 2021), manifestos for, and experiments in, conscientious citation (Ahmed, 2017; Mott & Cockayne, 2017; Smith et al., 2021), and reflections on political and affective investments in citation (Liu, 2021b; Nash, 2019, 2020). They have led to the creation of templates for inclusive citation (MacLeod, 2021), guidance for teaching or practising it (Bali, 2020; Calderón, 2022; Craven, 2021; Quave & Ohbi, 2024) and proposals for change in journal policies (Ray et al., 2024). They have covered different axes of citational exclusion, calling on us to cite those who are indigenous; racialised; ethnicised; located in the periphery and semi-periphery of global, regional and national geopolitics; women; trans and non-binary; queer; subordinated in terms of class or caste; early-career; precariously employed; speakers of languages other than English; disabled; or producing knowledge outside universities (e.g. community elders, amateur researchers, activists, artists) (Citational Justice Collective et al., 2023; Eidinger & McCraken, 2019; Kilomba, 2020; Kóczé & Bakos, 2021; Lunny, 2019; MacLeod, 2021; Marling, 2021; Smith et al., 2021; Williams, 2021).

Across this literature, there is a sense of the vital importance of critical politics and practices of citation. These are described as ‘one of the most important components of feminist research ethics’ (Liu, 2021b, p. 214), and seen as a practice of ‘brick-laying’ and ‘house-building’ (Ahmed, 2017) that can be ‘worldmaking’ (Nash, 2020, p. 82). They are performed as an ‘act of love’ (Smith et al., 2021, p. 11) and care (Mott & Cockayne, 2017). They are a ‘holistic and not just bibliographic project’ (Smith, 2021, p. 8), an ‘ethos’ (Smith et al., 2021, p. 11) and ‘a way of life’ (Smith, 2019 cited in Craven, 2021, p. 120). It is not surprising, then, that conversations about citation can be deeply affective, mourning erasure and loss, expressing anger and fatigue, mobilising desire and hope. Indeed, as Nash notes when discussing ‘citational desires’ and ‘longings’ in contemporary US Black feminism, ‘citationality is about far more than a name on a page – [for many US Black feminists] it is nothing short of life or death’ (2020, p. 78).

Nash observes that ‘[US] Black feminists have pinned our political hopes to citationality’ (2020, p. 80), building a ‘romance with citation as a form of freedom’ (2020, p. 83). It is understandable that many Black feminists, and other marginalised academics, have invested in such hopes and romances; they can be vital for scholars traumatised by violent experiences outside and within academia (Kilomba, 2020; Pearce, 2020). But Nash suggests that this ‘romance causes us to overlook’ the more problematic logics of critical citational politics (2020, p. 83) and the ‘messy institutional desires and attachments’ of critical scholars (2020, p. 87). In citation, as in other domains of life, supposedly positive affective orientations (happiness, care, hope, optimism) can block recognition of, and reckoning with, violence, injustice and complicity (Ahmed, 2010; Berlant, 2011). Thus, although I share a hopeful belief in the radical promise of citation, I want to question the effects of that belief, demonstrating that hopeful attachments to radical promises can sometimes unwittingly reproduce inequalities.

The political grammar of calls for corrective citation

In this section, I identify epistemic and political assumptions that commonly ground calls for corrective citation. To begin, a disclaimer. The interdisciplinary literature making these calls uses different terms – e.g. ‘conscientious citation’, ‘ethical citation’, ‘decolonising citation’, ‘radical citation’, ‘feminist citation’, ‘anti-racist citation’. Those terms have distinct genealogies and produce different inflections, but I do not have the space here to engage with those differences. Instead, I use corrective citation as an umbrella term to designate a conceptualisation of citation which can be found across that diverse literature, and which I will attempt to characterise in broad terms in this section. My characterisation relies on simplification and generalisation, and is disproportionately focused on Anglophone work. Therefore, some observations – by myself and others – that I share here will not represent fully every detail of each text engaging in these debates across contexts. A much closer reading of this literature would be extremely valuable but I am not able to offer it here. I regret this but argue that discussing calls for corrective citation in these schematic terms can still allow us to notice key aspects of the political grammar (Hemmings, 2011) and mood (Liu, 2021b; Pereira, 2019b) of calls for corrective citation in contemporary Anglophone scholarship.

The key tenet of these calls is that structural inequalities in society and academia are reflected in, and reproduced by, unequal patterns of academic citation, and can be tackled by proactively and conscientiously citing those who are marginalised. There is much variation between texts in terms of how straightforward they consider it is to formulate and enact strategies of critical citation, but they broadly share a corrective approach to citation. They are grounded on the idea that there is a problem in citation to be corrected, and they are driven by a desire to develop a (more) correct approach to citation. If we understand ‘to correct’ as ‘to set . . . right by punishing for a fault or error, to discipline’ (Online Etymology Dictionary [OED], 2024a), we can find all elements of that definition at play. Corrective approaches identify errors in existing citation practices – errors of attribution, omission, erasure, marginalisation. Setting these errors right often requires going against academic socialisation and hierarchies, so corrective citation requires discipline, in two ways. First, it becomes necessary to develop new habits and norms of correct citation and ‘instruct, educate, train’ (OED, 2024b) others on how to enact them. Second, to correctly enact those norms scholars must intentionally develop the ‘ability to restrain or guide or control oneself’ (OED, 2024b) when citing. Both sets of needs are met by the expanding body of texts and initiatives guiding us on doing corrective citation correctly. Sometimes, there are also correctional logics at play. In contexts (within and beyond academia) where corrective citation is considered intellectually right and politically just, failing to cite correct(ive)ly may lead to consequences experienced as punishing, such as having feelings of guilt or shame, or – as I will show below – being critiqued or rejected (En, 2024; Kanai, 2020; Liu, 2021a, 2021b; Nash, 2019, 2020).

Having identified general features of calls for corrective citation, I now want to focus specifically on how such calls (implicitly or explicitly) conceptualise positionality and power. The two are central concerns in corrective citation because the problem that it identifies and seeks to resolve is the insufficient, or incorrect, citation of people/groups, based on their position in relations of power. Location and identity become, therefore, invested with value and meaning, because it is partly on the basis of them that decisions are made about who to cite. In demarcating who is already cited too much and who needs to be more cited, calls for corrective citation usually presume that we know in advance, and in the abstract, which names are dominant and which names are marginal. (Though who is who will depend on which axes of inequality a particular call is focused on.) This means that positionality and identity can easily become reified in calls for corrective citation. Indeed, and as Liu argues, such calls rely on a ‘predetermined separation and hierarchical differentiation between forms of knowledge that are often seen to belong to certain bodies’ (2021b, p. 217). Because of this reification (Liu, 2021b), status and roles in corrective epistemic economies are often allocated in advance of the text and independent of the actual positions of individuals. As Chow observes in US contexts of corrective citation

. . . a text by a white author is subject to dispute because it is, by default, considered symptomatic of Western imperialism and exploitation. By the same token, a non-Western author . . . is often assumed in an a priori manner to be oppositional and emancipatory. . . . [I]rrespective of content, the non-Western X is often preassigned a politicized status and fixed in an externally imposed role – as the witting or unwitting harbinger of repair and purification to Western thought. . . . In all these cases, a tacit pact of already-known meaning has been made in advance. (2021, pp. 22–23)

When epistemic (in)justice is framed in these terms, we can end up treating particular positionalities (and the authors considered to embody them) as inherently marginal or dominant, regardless of the ‘real-life’ relative positionality of the specific individuals cited; I discuss textual and empirical examples of this in the following sections. This can lead to simplistic, and sometimes binary, forms of thinking about power (Ye, 2021). Consider, for example, these sentences:

Citational politics, and ultimately praxis . . ., can be inclusionary or exclusionary, but they are never neutral. (Craven, 2021, p. 120; my emphasis)

We argue for a conscientious engagement with the politics of citation that is mindful of how citational practices can be tools for either the reification of, or resistance to, unethical hierarchies of knowledge. (Mott & Cockayne, 2017, p. 956; my emphasis)

Both these quotes set up the relationship between citation and power as an either/or relationship: citation can either resist or reify, include or exclude; there is little space here for a recognition that citation may both reify and resist, include and exclude at the same time. I will return to these either/or stories later in the article.

What often emerges, then, in calls for corrective citation is a framing of power that can disregard or disavow key aspects of critical conceptualisations of power. First, there is little explicit recognition of the fact that structures of inequality are multidimensional and intersectional, and therefore those we cite are likely to be both marginal and privileged. We are reminded of this when intersecting inequalities within groups lead, for example, to some Black scholars (Alvarez & Caldwell, 2016; Macharia, 2016; Nash, 2020; Smith et al., 2021) or some names from the global South (Liu, 2021b; Martinez & Sá, 2020; Roy, 2023) or scholars from certain regions in Europe (Kóczé & Bakos, 2021; Marling, 2021; Pereira, 2014) acquiring much more citation and status than others. Second, and related to the above, there is little explicit recognition that positionality and power are always contingent and relative, which means that whether one ‘counts’ as privileged or marginal will depend on where one is and who one is interacting with, or being compared to (Ye, 2021).

Both these oversights become especially surprising if one remembers that colleagues calling for corrective citation are usually proponents of sophisticated theories of power that centre intersectionality, multidimensionality, complexity and non-binary thinking. To explain this, we might argue that in our ‘romance with citation as a form of freedom’ (Nash, 2020, p. 83), in our fantasy for ‘intimacy, symmetry or commensurability’ (Roy, 2023, p. 1250), and in our longing for a solution capable ‘of delivering (or at least bringing us closer to) social justice’ (Chow, 2021, p. 19), we overlook, or look away from, things that are uncomfortable (Chadwick, 2023). These might include inequalities within and between marginal groups, the contradictory investments of critical scholars, the entanglements of radical practices in the norms they seek to undo, the failures of collaboration and solidarity, the limits of efforts to avoid epistemic exclusion, and the domination (or even violence) reproduced by people or texts we hold dear (Dotson, 2012; Fishberg et al., 2023; Hemmings, 2011; Nash, 2020; Pereira, 2017; Roy, 2023). Another explanation for the contemporary prevalence of these particular conceptualisations of power and positionality is that they reflect, to some extent, broader trends in activism and critical scholarship within (and beyond) the Anglophone world. Such trends include ‘a reinvigoration of authentic and singular notions of identity’ (Kanai, 2020, p. 44), a renewed investment in ‘models of correction, discipline, and ownership as core feminist [epistemic-political] practices’ (Nash & Pinto, 2021, p. 888), the embracing of political logics focused on ‘striv[ing] for a state of purity and innocence from complicity in systems of domination’ (En, 2024, p. 12) and increased pressures on critical academics (and activists) to clearly display their radical credentials, namely by ‘cast[ing] oneself as ideologically sound’ and ‘project[ing] . . . complicity/problematic behaviour onto others’ (Dean, 2023, p. 17).

I want to argue that we should divest from this particular political grammar of corrective citation and build alternative political grammars that acknowledge that power in academia is more complicated than familiar binaries – dominant/marginal, cited/erased, insider/outsider, reproducing/resisting – allow us to recognise. There are three clusters of complexity that we must pay closer attention to. First, we must acknowledge that different forms of power are at play in academic work and status. Academic positionalities are certainly shaped by deeply entrenched structures of inequality (of race, gender, geopolitics, etc.) cutting across society (Kilomba, 2020; Puwar, 2004; Ribeiro, 2024) – these are the dynamics of power that corrective citation is most attuned to. But as I develop elsewhere (Pereira, 2017, 2019a), they are also shaped by two other related, but different, dynamics of power: institutionalised professional hierarchies of scholarly status and access to resources, and the more contingent and local micro-politics of situated, affective, embodied encounters between people. These three forms of power often align with, and reinforce, each other (as with the structurally privileged scholar who holds a senior position and has influence in a particular meeting). But often, there are pulls in different directions both between the three levels of power, and also within each one (consider the white woman scholar from a Western country systematically marginalised within her home institution but celebrated as an authority when invited to speak in a country in the global South). This is why it can be misleading and problematic to conceptualise marginality in essentialist terms, i.e. as an intrinsic and stable property of particular names or bodies.

This last example points us towards the second cluster of complexity: the fact that the patterned, but ultimately contingent, relationships between forms of power are further complexified when taking scale and space into account. A name can be, at the same time, a highly-cited authority in a body of literature, and a marginal, erased figure within their broader discipline; this is the case, for example, with several US Black feminist theorists who, as Nash (2019, 2020) observes, are both heavily cited insiders and systematically erased outsiders. Similarly, one’s position in local relations of power does not always neatly match, or predict, one’s position in global relations of power (Pereira, 2014). If we conflate marginality in one of those levels with an overall marginal position, we will likely fail to recognise the ways in which global marginalities conceal local dominance and vice versa, as I will show below.

Finally, and because of the various complexities above, it is crucial to remember a third cluster of complexity: the fact that corrective action within texts (i.e. in economies of citation) might not necessarily have the effects we imagine and intend in epistemic-material inequalities outside texts. In most contemporary academic cultures, being cited, and citing the ‘right’ people, can significantly affect access to institutional resources and career opportunities, and therefore professional power (Mott & Cockayne, 2017; Smith et al., 2021). It is, thus, important to acknowledge that our citing of others, and our judgement of their citation, however radical, is not ‘outside of power’ (Roy, 2023, p. 1240), or only resistant to power. Even the most well intentioned and carefully considered acts of corrective citation can potentially enact or enable injustice (Dotson, 2012; Liu, 2021a, 2021b). As Nash writes – drawing on Ahmed’s (2017) conceptualisation of feminist corrective citation as the laying down of bricks to build new houses and shelters – ‘“brick-laying” can be its own act of hierarchy and omission regardless of who is laying the bricks, and what their commitments are’ (2020, p. 83).

I have argued that considering these three clusters of complexity is important in discussions about corrective citation. To demonstrate why, I will now analyse three sets of examples where those complexities make a difference – not just to how we conceptualise power in texts but also how people experience power in their lives. I draw on a combination of observations from my longitudinal ethnography of academia ¹ (Pereira, 2017), retrospective reflection on experiences I had at conferences and while editing an international feminist journal, ² and published work describing other colleagues’ academic encounters.

Why do you not cite them? Corrective citation and academic gatekeeping

Opening an article on the paradoxes of feminist citation, Liu (2021b) recounts an experience at a decolonial feminist symposium in Finland.

During the Q&A session after my presentation . . . [on] air pollution in China, I received the following question: ‘Why don’t you cite any decolonial scholars?’ . . . The question was posed by the keynote speaker, who noted that I only cited postcolonial scholars located in the Anglo-American context. . . . Interestingly, although my presentation concerned the Chinese context, the lack of reference to Chinese scholars working on the issue of air pollution . . . in China was not pointed out or criticised. (2021b, pp. 212–213)

For Liu, this constitutes a paradox because ‘the demand for certain citational practices reinstalls the logic of proper(ty) and author(ity) at the centre of the decolonial project’ (2021b, p. 214). This moves her to ask:

What constitutes an attempt to decolonise knowledge production? Is it about making reference to the work of scholars who are identified as decolonial thinkers? How are these identifications made? Is it based on the geopolitical location of the writer? Does the reference to a decolonial thinker stand for and as decolonial practice? (Liu, 2021a, pp. 89–90)

Liu’s questions prompted me to reflect on my experiences while serving as an editor for the journal Feminist Theory. During that time, I gained insight into how peer reviewers assess what counts as ‘proper’ feminist knowledge, scholarly enough to be accepted in a highly-ranked international journal but also radical enough to be featured in a publication committed to ‘critically engaging with shifting disciplinary hierarchies within feminist theory’ and publishing ‘work by feminists from all parts of the world’ (Feminist Theory, n.d.). It was particularly interesting to observe how reviewers judged an article’s level of ‘critical engagement with . . . hierarchies’ and how this judgement interacted with the desire to publish ‘feminists from all parts of the world’. Two similar situations with two different articles offer an interesting illustration. Both articles were pieces on queer themes written by authors originating from, and working in, the global South. When selecting reviewers, I made sure I invited colleagues in marginalised positions – one might say I was doing ‘corrective’ reviewer selection. For these specific articles, I was especially committed to having reviewers who were queer and/or from the global South. Finding reviewers in times of academic performativity, when many are too busy to say ‘yes’ to these forms of work (Pereira, 2017, 2019b; Sifaki, 2016), is not easy. . . but I eventually found willing reviewers. Weeks later, I received the reports. In both articles, a curious thing happened – a reviewer admonished the author for their citations, noting they relied too much on ‘Western’ or ‘white’ scholars and were therefore not ‘decolonised’ or ‘diverse’ enough. The authors were instructed to read more widely and engage with calls to decolonise knowledge. On both occasions, the reviewer’s tone was a little patronising – it was clear the reviewers felt that the authors had failed in being critical and thus needed to be corrected, educated, disciplined. On both occasions, the reviewers proposed rejecting the paper – though problems with citation were just one of several reasons offered.

Exploring the three clusters of complexity (above) in relation to these two cases throws up some interesting – and complex – details. The two admonishing reviewers were queer and radical scholars but were also white and European. The two aspiring authors, also queer, were not white and were based in the global South. They had tried in the past to submit articles to Western journals but struggled to get published. One was hoping for an acceptance from us because an output in a highly-ranked Anglophone journal would secure a promotion, and thereby the security they needed to be able to keep doing queer teaching and research in an institution that did not take it seriously, within a country increasingly persecuting queer and feminist scholars. But the two authors were not just marginal. In terms of race, for example, they were marginalised in global relations and certainly racialised relative to the two white reviewers; yet in the racial hierarchies of their local contexts, they occupied a position of some privilege.

Considering the relationship between what happens in the text and what happens beyond it is also instructive here. I noted that editorial decisions about the text could have direct real-life institutional effects. The reverse is also true – what goes on in institutions will have direct effects on texts, often in ways that (some) reviewers cannot recognise. Considering the significant constraints on access to academic books and journals in many universities in (semi-)peripheral countries (Keim & Rodriguez Medina, 2023; Pereira, 2022), it is possible – even likely – that one or both authors did not have as much access to international critical literature as they have to international ‘canonical’ literature, or as much access to international critical literature as the two reviewers do. Institutional culture is also likely to play a role here. As Martinez and Sá note, ‘[f]or researchers in the global South, international recognition in science arguably involves engaging with the norms, ideas, and people leading research activity in the global North’ (2020, p. 39; see also Roy, 2023). Therefore, extensive citation of authors from the global North may be understood not just as an oversight through which one excludes others, but also as a strategy of epistemic negotiation through which a marginal subject attempts to become included (Pereira, 2014; Roy, 2023). Many of us know that critical Anglophone journals, like Feminist Theory, are – or seek to be – different from mainstream journals. Because such journals value corrective citation, it may be more beneficial for those wishing to publish in them to cite global South authors, rather than the usual names from the global North, which is clearly what both reviewers expected. Yet, to even be aware of these nuanced differences between global North journals already requires being very familiar with Anglophone debates.

Much like in Liu’s (2021a, 2021b) story, there is a paradox at play here. Even as they instruct the global South authors to engage less with global North literature, the reviewers desire those authors to be aware of calls in the global North to cite the ‘correct’ literatures (as defined by the reviewers from the global North). Even as they instruct the global South authors to better decolonise their knowledge, the reviewers from the global North enact an arguably colonial move seeking to discipline their colleagues’ knowledge production. The reviewers’ plea for more inclusive citation is, undeniably, radical and entirely well intentioned (an act of care, a commitment to social justice) but it also, of course, reproduces the very logics (of canonical regulation, of Western disciplining, of epistemic exclusion) it seeks to undo. In this exchange, like in so many others, citing the ‘correct’ names becomes necessary to be recognised as producing ‘proper’ knowledge – the people that function as ‘authorising names’ and ‘authorising bodies’ (Mohanty, 1988; Pereira, 2014) may change, but the authorising, boundary-marking logic persists. As Dotson powerfully demonstrates, ‘[o]ne can believe that they have avoided harmful epistemic exclusions . . . only to find out that one has utterly failed in avoiding others’ (2012, p. 36).

In the end, one article was published but the other was rejected. When returning the reviews to each author, I edited the reviewers’ comments about citation to make them less punishing and more constructive. Corrective citation is a valuable tool, so we should not give up the ambition to produce journals or spaces that expect and reward critical attention to citational economies. However, we must not become so confident or complacent about the radical promise of corrective citation that we overlook the dangers of using it for academic judgement and gatekeeping.

No power to see here, we’re radical! Feeling marginal and being seen as central

In a recent article in this journal, Puwar (2020) draws attention to the ways in which some authors from the global North have become ‘centre-staged’ as messengers of knowledge from the global South. Puwar argues that although this centre-staging aims to decentre ‘established . . . sites and flows of knowledge’, it can ‘reproduce the same patterns . . . it seeks to unsettle’ (2020, p. 540). In Puwar’s article – specifically focused on Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Raewyn Connell – the privileged position of the centre-staged messengers is described as relatively obvious:

Whiteness has the privilege of being invisible and normative. . . . This applies to Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Raewyn Connell, though not equally, as Connell’s performativity is inflected by transgendered alignments. Both figures benefit from the affordances of whiteness. There is little attention to how the privilege of whiteness enables them to become global advocates of the South. (Puwar, 2020, pp. 543–544)

The obviousness of these two scholars’ (racial and geopolitical) privilege (even if that privilege often becomes invisible) makes it very clear for Puwar why the centre-staging of these figures can be problematic. But how can we conceptualise instances of ‘centre-staging’ where privilege and marginality combine in more complex and contested ways? How do we approach situations where those we centre-stage (or who centre-stage themselves) can be read both as marginal, excluded voices and also as privileged, excluding speakers?

To explore these questions, I draw on episodes from conferences. As we saw in Liu’s (2021b) story above, conferences can be fascinating spaces of negotiation of epistemic and professional hierarchies (Henderson, 2020; Oliver & Morris, 2020; Pereira, 2022). They are also rich sites in which to explore the effects of the three clusters of complexity. This is because they are places where people interact in both epistemic and embodied terms – which means they bridge the textual and the material in particularly immediate ways. Moreover, those interacting in conferences have often travelled from other (disciplinary, geographic) places to get there and may be meeting colleagues from places, perspectives and positionalities they less often encounter. This produces disorientations of scale and unfamiliar configurations of micro-political inequalities. Consequently, our usual reference maps of relations of power (and our position within them) might not easily apply – meaning that someone who often is, and feels, marginal may suddenly become seen as central, and vice versa.

The first episode took place in a US feminist conference a few years ago. Perusing the programme, I spotted a session on Black feminisms in Brazil. Until then, all presentations I had heard focused on the US – though they rarely named that focus or reflected on its specificity – so as a Portuguese scholar with connections to Brazilian feminists, I was excited about this session. There were several people in the room, including Brazilian delegates. All speakers were Black women but none were Brazilian – all were from the US. Some had researched in Brazil for many years and were clearly passionate and knowledgeable about Brazilian culture and feminisms (and fluent in Brazilian Portuguese), but others had relatively limited engagement with Black feminisms in Brazil. The names of Black Brazilian authors were mentioned but not as thinkers, only as inspirational figures with impressive and/or difficult lives; their ideas, concepts and theories were not explained or used. The experiences of Black women in Brazil, described as ‘our sisters’, were implicitly assumed to be largely similar to, and easily conflatable with, the experiences of Black women in the US. Familiar tropes about Brazil (favelas, samba, joy) were invoked uncritically and the session was animated by a diffuse but unmistakeable exoticisation of Brazil and Brazilian Black feminists – a loving exoticisation, clearly from a place of curiosity and care, but an exoticisation nonetheless.

When the Q&A started, some Brazilian delegates asked diplomatic but probing questions. The speakers did not seem to realise they were being probed and continued to respond in the same excited, but fairly oblivious, tone. After a while, a delegate asked an explicitly critical question about the problems of US scholars representing Brazilian feminists in exoticising ways. This time, the speakers understood they were being probed, but most were genuinely confused and seemed to struggle to fully grasp how their engagement with Black Brazilian feminisms might be problematic. Although they never articulated this explicitly, the questions on their mind seemed to be: how could Black women’s use of other Black women’s work be appropriative? How could they be accused of silencing (or ‘centre-staging’, to use Puwar’s [2020] term) if they are themselves marginal and driven by radical, loving intentions? The session ended. Some Portuguese-speaking participants gravitated towards each other. I remarked ‘wow, that was. . . weird!’ One Brazilian delegate, a PhD student at a US university, shook her head with the weary expression of someone who had heard similar conversations many times: ‘what can we expect? They’re American.’ She was not angry or hateful; just resigned to the realisation that even marginal Americans with the noblest intentions and most radical credentials can often reproduce the obliviousness, and ‘exceptionalism’ (Wekker, 2021), enabled by the politically, academically and culturally hegemonic position of the US.

Similar dynamics can be identified in another episode, this time at a feminist conference in Europe which featured as keynote speaker an influential US scholar of colour. In their keynote, the speaker discussed the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, but made problematic generalisations about Ukrainians and did not cite or acknowledge Ukrainian feminists. Several Central and Eastern European (CEE) delegates were deeply disturbed and expressed that in the Q&A. The atmosphere became tense. The episode was narrated many times across several intense conversations during and after the conference. Most narrations shared one key feature – they framed the episode in quite binary terms, as an encounter between someone who is obviously privileged and someone who is obviously marginal. They offered, however, opposing accounts of who was who. In some stories, the speaker held the privilege: here was a well-off and influential scholar who, as an American, felt entitled to comment on other countries without doing adequate research or citing local experts. In other stories, that same speaker was a victim: a racialised queer person who had travelled from very far to be attacked (while jetlagged) in a predominantly white space. The first set of stories asked us to side with the CEE scholars, described as peripheralised feminists traumatised by an ongoing invasion who bravely spoke out against the dominance of European and American colleagues. The second set described those same CEE scholars very differently – as problematic white feminists who had publicly undermined a person of colour. The role of the conference organisers was also dissected. For some, they occupied a position of power: gatekeepers reproducing Anglo-American hegemonies and Ukrainian erasures by inviting an American keynote and no Ukrainian speakers. For others, they occupied a disadvantaged position: precariously employed and deeply exhausted colleagues sacrificing their work and personal life to organise the event for others (on a voluntary basis and limited budget), and now expected to manage everyone’s frustration. These were either/or stories, structured through confident classifications into supposedly straightforward binary categories. There was often little scope in these stories to foreground complexity, and to recognise that opposing interpretations could both be true simultaneously, i.e. that all those involved might be accurately described as both privileged and marginalised, both oppressive and oppressed.

In both these conference episodes there is a striking clash, or incommensurability (Boka En, personal communication, May 31, 2023), between different readings of the power relations at play and one’s position within them. Kasembeli (2020) observed a similar dynamic in her analysis of the micro-politics of a panel at the University of the Western Cape in 2016 during the South African Student #Fallist Movements. For Kasembeli, academic events can make visible the disjuncture between local vs global, abstract vs embodied, and speakers’ vs audiences’ readings of power relations. In such situations ‘peculiar chasm[s] . . . [can] emerg[e]’ (Kasembeli, 2020, p. 322), creating ‘dissonance’ between what is said and what is heard (Macharia, 2016).

But how are conference chasms related to corrective citation? These chasms are a result of the clusters of complexity I have identified above and the dynamic ways in which power gets reconfigured as names and bodies move. I show elsewhere (Pereira, 2014) that academics become invested with, and carry with them, the epistemic status of the locations (institutions, disciplines, countries) they are seen to represent. Even people who are marginal within those locations, and denied epistemic status inside them, may become invested with, and benefit from, that epistemic status as they travel (or are read) elsewhere – sometimes without realising it. These complexities certainly seem to be at play in the examples above. Unfortunately, contemporary grammars of corrective citation can inadvertently close off the space for engagement with those complexities, making it harder for us to recognise entanglements of power. For example, the #CiteBlackWomen statement tells us:

It’s simple. Cite Black Women. . . . We theorize, we innovate, we revolutionize the world. We do not need mediators. We do not need interpreters. It is time to disrupt the canon. It is time to upturn the erasures. (Smith et al., 2021, p. 10; original emphasis)

It is, of course, simple – we must cite Black women, full stop. But it is also complicated, opening new cans of worms and questions – for example, ‘which Black women?’ (Nash, 2019, 2020). As they are currently framed, calls for corrective citation do not allow space to explicitly recognise that marginal scholars might not just be mediated and interpreted – they may themselves also unknowingly and inadvertently take ‘centre-stage’ (Puwar, 2020) as mediators and interpreters of others, particularly those who are even more marginal than them. This is a price we may be willing to pay as an academic community – at the end of the day, someone has to be on stage and in citation lists, so it might as well be those who are structurally marginalised, even if they are also, in other ways, privileged. But this should not lead us to assume that the enunciations (and acts) of marginal scholars are always-already and only-ever resistant to all forms of power (Chow, 2021). As Dotson notes, it is very ‘easy . . . to perpetrate epistemic oppression, even while working to address epistemic oppression’, especially if we use conceptual frameworks that foreclose the possibility of identifying oppressions beyond those centred by our framework (2012, p. 25). Acknowledgement that positionalities are complex and that oppression may come both from ‘usual suspects’ and unexpected ones, must, therefore, be at the centre of calls for corrective citation, so that we can recognise when ‘act[s] of decentring . . . reproduce the same patterns . . . [they] see[k] to unsettle’ (Puwar, 2020, p. 540).

Resisting power here, enabling power there: Global citation and local violence

In their Citation Practices Challenge, Tuck et al. note that ‘[w]e often cite those who are more famous’ (2015). Echoing this, Ahmed writes that ‘[y]ou are asked to follow the well-trodden paths of citation, to cite properly as to cite those deemed to have already the most influence. The more a path is used, the more a path is used. The more he is cited, the more he is cited’ (2019, p. 167; my emphases). At the root of calls for corrective citation is the belief that the influence generated by ‘well-trodden paths of citation’ is a problem not just because it shapes ideas, but also because it bestows power in institutional hierarchies and academic interactions. As Mott and Cockayne write, ‘[w]ell-cited scholars have authority precisely because they are well-cited’ (2017, p. 966).

All these authors – Tuck et al. (2015), Ahmed (2019), Mott and Cockayne (2017) – implicitly presume that the famous scholar who is more cited is a (white) ‘he’. But practices of corrective citation generate their own ‘well-trodden paths of citation’ where to ‘cite properly’ means to cite ‘other’ names – not white, not male, etc. – which then become more and more cited. If corrective citation helps create its own paths of concentration of citation, then it is important to probe into the forms of power that it might unwittingly enable. This is what I hoped to do in this section, but it was a difficult section to write. I sought to show that people we cite as ‘marginal’ scholars can become, partly due to our committed radical citation of them, powerful individuals able to dominate others. To do so effectively, I would need to take a scholar who is usually unequivocally framed as marginal and reveal the forms of exploitation or violence they engage in. I am aware of several examples I could use – you may be aware of some yourself. But I do not consider it appropriate or fair to build my argument through sensational revelations based on hearsay or private experiences. I decided, therefore, to draw on a less unequivocal example, but one which is topical, already in the public domain and can be discussed through published texts and my research data (Pereira, 2017). I am referring to the accusations recently levelled against Boaventura de Sousa Santos of exploitative labour practices, intellectual extractivism and harassment (Cardoso, 2023; Viaene et al., 2023).

Santos does not, of course, occupy a marginal positionality – he is a highly-cited, multiple award-winning white European man (though many colleagues seem to assume he is Brazilian) who has for long occupied positions of significant influence in Portugal and internationally. However, he presents himself (Phipps, 2007; Puwar, 2020), and is understood (and regularly cited) by others, as a clearly radical figure who should be part of the alternative ‘paths of citation’ laid out by those seeking to build progressive canons. For example, the introduction page for Teaching Citational Practice (2023), a website for academics wanting to teach critical feminist approaches to citation, cites only two theorists – Sara Ahmed and Boaventura de Sousa Santos. He was also one of the first names to be featured in Global Social Theory, a website which ‘seeks to provide an introduction to a variety of theorists and theories from around the world’, inspired by ‘the recent campaign organised by students in the UK asking “Why is my curriculum white?”’ (Bhambra, n.d.).

In April 2023, a book chapter was published by three scholars (Viaene et al., 2023) describing forms of exploitation, exclusion and harassment that they and others allegedly experienced when working with an unnamed ‘Star Professor’ and other colleagues at an unidentified centre of critical research. After online speculation, Santos admitted that he was the ‘Star Professor’ discussed in the piece, though he strenuously denied the accusations. Other women – including Brazilian congresswoman Isabella Gonçalves and Moira Millán, an indigenous Mapuche activist from Argentina – came forward with similar accusations, and an international collective of victims was formed. Hundreds of academics and public figures signed statements in support of Santos or the women accusing him (full disclosure: I signed the latter). The case was front page news in the Portuguese media and an independent inquiry was launched. In the summer of 2023, Routledge removed from circulation the book which contained the chapter after receiving ‘legal threats from various parties’ (Routledge, 2023). At the time of writing (May 2024), the book remains unavailable and the case is back in the media, due to the publication of the inquiry report, which has prompted renewed debate and fresh calls for action on academic exploitation and misconduct.

There is much to unpick and discuss in the case. For the purpose of this article, however, I am less interested in what Santos has allegedly done or how different institutions have (re)acted, and more interested in how the citational positioning of Santos shapes what he and others can, or cannot, do. I argue that this case shows that the systematic citation of someone as radical or marginal may make it easier for them to exert power over others, and harder for victims and bystanders to name and fight forms of abuse. In my own fieldwork for an ethnography of Portuguese academia (Pereira, 2017), I observed several situations where Santos’s credentials as a radical intellectual were explicitly invoked to position him as a high-status figure, generating interaction dynamics where junior colleagues – especially women – were interpellated or expected to assist him, serve him or show deference to him. The three original accusers (and those who accused him later) have also declared that his status as a highly-cited scholar and his reputation as a radical author shaped the conditions and consequences of their alleged experiences of abuse.

They note that ‘thanks to [Santos’s] international profile, [his institution - Centro de Estudos Sociais, University of Coimbra] was able to attract a lot of national and international research funding’ and therefore recruit ‘Ph.D. students and junior researchers from all around the world’ (Viaene et al., 2023, pp. 210–211). They explain that all three of them ‘went to this international recognized research centre to learn about (de)colonization, emancipatory, and transformative social sciences’ (Viaene et al., 2023, p. 209). According to them

. . . the institution’s approach to bullying, manipulation, coercion, and control is worsened by the fact that it [espouses] theoretical principles about a decolonial, inclusive, and reflexive academia . . . [thus creating a] huge theory-practice gap [which] enhances abusive relationships. (2023, p. 218)

They also write that ‘the institutional machinery’ acted quickly ‘to oppress and silence people who publicly denounce[d the] abuse through social media . . . . The main focus was clearly protecting [Santos’s] good name and the institution’s international fame at all costs’ (2023, p. 218). Other women’s testimonies confirm this feeling that high citation, a ‘good name’ and radical credentials play a key role in this case. Millán, for example, reported that she was initially discouraged from making a complaint about her alleged experiences of harassment by Santos because he was a ‘guru of the left’ and ‘the right[-wing] would take advantage’ of accusations against him (Matamala, 2023). She was also told that her claims about Santos would not be believed because of his strong global reputation as a committed advocate of women’s and indigenous rights.

The systematic citation of Santos as radical seems to have made his alleged behaviours not only harder to denounce, but also more hurtful. Viaene, Laranjeiro and Tom explain that they

. . . have been dealing with combinations . . . of burnout, depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder . . . . This gives us an even more bitter taste because . . . the Star Professor’s [Santos] research agenda seeks social justice and deep social transformation. (2023, p. 221)

This was also evident in online reactions: many scholars noted on social media that the revelations – and Santos’s subsequent statements about them – were ‘utterly disappointing’ and had ‘broken [their] heart’, leaving them ‘disorientated’ and ‘not knowing what to think’ or ‘who to trust’ (Suzina, 2023). Colleagues felt like this precisely because Santos was an object of affection and investment, a theoretical and political compass, a trusted figure and a foundation of the alternative ‘houses’ they had built through critical citational brick-laying (Ahmed, 2017).

This case might be – in some ways – extreme but it is not exceptional. The dynamics described here are not unique quirks of individual rotten apples but integral elements of how economies of citation and influence (whether canonical or corrective) work, both in the global North and global South (Roy, 2023). As critical epistemic communities, we wish to celebrate and cite those who develop inspiring radical ideas. But corrective citation, like all forms of citation, bestows status. Therefore, like all forms of citation, it can directly contribute to creating academic hierarchies which may enable abuses of power. Corrective citation is offered as a critique of the unequal economies of influence generated by ‘well-trodden paths of citation’ (Ahmed, 2019, p. 167) but corrective citational acts do not exist outside of that economy. Our corrective citations are themselves also agents of academic economies of influence, creating paths of citation that may be less trodden and more diverse, but also have the power to confer authority, concentrate influence and enable exploitation. If we do not explicitly recognise this in conversations about critical citation, it will be more difficult to denounce abuses of power by those we have hailed as ‘good names’ to cite.

Looking for what we cannot see: Recognising opacity in corrective citation

Who’s bad and who’s good? . . . Who has the power and who is powerless? All of these questions are the wrong question. It’s more complicated than that, sugar. However complicated you think it is, everything is always more complicated than that. There are no shortcuts. Not to understanding and not to knowledge. You can’t put anyone into a box. (Alderman, 2016, p. 319)

As I conclude this article, I realise that I failed to properly practise what I proposed here. While writing, I often thought about your judgement of my citations. I sometimes felt relieved when I cited authors who ‘tick’ several marginality ‘boxes’ and I remained invested in being judged a ‘good’ critical scholar, who cites ‘enough’ marginal names (and who is marginal ‘enough’ to be cited herself). This shaped my writing of this text, both in ways that I can see and ways that remain opaque to me. This means I wrote an article critiquing the metric (Mott & Cockayne, 2017; Nash, 2020) and market (Shange, 2022) logics of citational judgements and the reifying (Liu, 2021b) grammar of the labels they rely on, but was still entangled in those logics, thinking within that grammar and preoccupied with the rewards, or punishments, that such judgements can provide. This grammar of corrective citation clearly has a strong hold over many of us.

In this article, I explored key features of its conceptualisation of power and positionality. One could summarise those key features by saying that contemporary calls for corrective citation in Anglophone critical scholarship often place considerable focus on visibility and transparency; in other words, they often have an optical emphasis (Fishberg et al., 2023). Indeed, calls for corrective citation generally focus on what becomes (in)visible in and through citation and have an interest in what citation lists look like (as well as how we look when we cite certain names). They often conceptualise power relations through what is easier to observe, such as the relatively obvious marginalities read off bodies, names, pronouns, locations. They often presume that we can see the different layers of multidimensional positionalities, that relations of power are clear, that we must oversee others’ citation practices and that we can foresee how power will play out and what effects corrective citation will have in the world. Yet, as myself and others have argued, there are always things we overlook, that we do not yet see or will never fully see – namely, our entanglements in power or what happens outside texts or in local contexts. We can identify that optical emphasis in the three examples discussed here. In the first (journal peer review), the emphasis was on what could be seen in citation lists, overlooking the conditions of their production. The second (conferences) focused on supposedly obvious aspects of identity, overlooking the complexities and entanglements of positionality. In the third example (reputation), we saw that a focus on how a name looks can block efforts to make inequalities visible. We need, then, a framework for thinking about citation that is attuned both to what is obvious and what is harder to see.

But how can we create space in our conceptualisation for what we cannot see? Like others (Khan, 2022; Marling, 2021), I find Glissant’s (1997) concept of opacity very generative in this regard. Glissant suggests that notions of difference found in Western thought – and, one could add, in many calls for corrective citation – are based on a ‘requirement for transparency. In order to understand and thus accept [and cite] you, I have to measure your solidity with the ideal scale providing me with grounds to make comparisons and, perhaps, judgments. I have to reduce’ (1997, p. 190). He argues that this is based on, and gives rise to, ‘many certainties and . . . so-called lucid truths’ and laments ‘the excesses of these political assurances’ (Glissant, 1997, p. 194). Glissant wonders if ‘perhaps we need to bring an end to the very notion of a scale[;] [d]isplace all reduction’ (1997, p. 190), and recognise ‘there are limits to absolute truth’ (1997, p. 194). He suggests we ‘move toward entanglement’ and foreground opacity, ‘that which cannot be reduced’ (1997, p. 191). According to Glissant, acknowledging there is always opacity ‘mak[es] me sensitive to the limits of every method’ and ‘distracts me from absolute truths whose guardian I might believe myself to be’ (1997, p. 192).

In the specific case of conversations about citation, acknowledging opacity would involve trying to actively avoid the reductions – i.e. binaries and simplifications – I identified above as common features of contemporary grammars of corrective citation. It would mean writing and talking differently about the relationship between power, positionality and citation. Instead of treating that relationship as obvious and valuing confident pronouncements about what counts as radical citation, we would cultivate greater awareness of the unexpected, complex, uncertain, contingent aspects of academic power dynamics. We would ‘divest from models of correction [and] discipline’ in citation (Nash & Pinto, 2021, p. 888) and become more attentive to the risks of generalising labels – such as ‘black women’ (Nash, 2020) or ‘global South’ (Roy, 2023). We would invest more in ‘place-based’, ‘case-by-case approach[es]’ to critical citation (Calderón, 2022, pp. 44, 47), grounded on ‘careful local archaeologies’ (Marling, 2021, p. 102), i.e. nuanced, dynamic and close analyses of the intersectional power relations at play in particular locations. Developing case-by-case approaches will often be impossible, because we cannot know in depth all the academic places we pass through and because increasing pressures to produce knowledge quickly (Pereira, 2017) leave us with little opportunity for careful questioning of common assumptions. At times, we all need epistemic or political shortcuts – I have used many in this article myself. But even when we have limited time or word-count, small tweaks to writing or teaching on power and positionality can make a difference (Calderón, 2022). As Dotson argues, for example, making adjustments to sentences when writing about epistemic oppression (including adding qualifiers or situating claims) can prevent ‘hard and fast foreclosures’ (2012, p. 42) which block us from recognising oppressions we do not easily see – often precisely those we benefit from.

Small or big adjustments to our frameworks and our writing will not, of course, fix all the problems. As Dotson argues, ‘avoiding unwarranted epistemic exclusions . . . may well be impossible. . . . [W]e simply do not have the capacity to track all the implications of our positions on any given issue, which would, arguably, be necessary to avoid epistemic oppression entirely’ (2012, pp. 24–25). The failure to avoid reproducing power is an integral aspect of any radical epistemic practice, not just a thing that happens when some scholars do things wrong and can be stopped if we do them right. Therefore, the possibility, or rather the inevitability, of failure in corrective citation must be at the centre of conceptualisations of the politics of citation. The aim, then, would be ‘not to have the answers but to ask even more questions’ (Kilomba, 2016 cited in Barreiros & Moreira, 2019, p. 73) about power and citation. This means becoming more attuned to everyone’s entanglements in complex relations of power and less quick to assume that power is always and only ‘over there’. Returning to the examples I discussed above, such an approach could enable us to write journal peer reviews more constructively, practise academic gatekeeping more reflexively, read audiences more carefully, navigate conference chasms more generatively and confront problematic behaviour more easily. This would hopefully illuminate obscured academic power imbalances within critical scholarship and allow us to have more responsible and response-able (Kathrin Thiele, personal communication, May 31, 2023) debates about them. In the different political grammar of citation I propose here, we would still aspire to build houses with different bricks (Ahmed, 2017), feel optimistic about the radical potential of citation and cultivate citational relations of love and care. . . but we might (at least sometimes) get less caught up in the seduction of certainties that cloud our vision, skew our analyses and limit our imagination.