Making Knowledge Under Unequal Conditions

Citation politics is often understood as a call for scholars to become more aware of who they cite and to include a wider range of voices.

This view rests on an assumption that alternative knowledge is simply out there, waiting to be found if scholars look hard enough or cite more ethically. This overlooks the fact that citation is a form of knowledge boundary-making. Citations do not just reflect what is known; they shape what counts as knowledge and what remains hard—or impossible—to recognise. Looking for “new” knowledges is therefore never straightforward, because recognition is shaped by existing knowledge boundaries. I develop this argument by taking Community Schools in the Philippines as the starting point of my research on language and education. I show how reworking citation practices involves producing and co-producing a culturally grounded understanding of Community Schools by bringing together bodies of knowledge from different traditions and historical moments, within unequal institutional and material infrastructures of knowledge production. Through this process, citation becomes a creative, political, and transgressive act. In the end, changing one’s citation lines is about producing new knowledge and reshaping who we are—and who we aim to become—as scholars, while working within hegemonic systems that make such knowledge-making difficult and uneven.

Contact

• Organiser: Philippine Studies at SOAS
• Contact: philippinestudies@soas.ac.uk

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