Teaching and Learning a Joyful Citation Praxis: Affective Relations for Fostering Community Through Our Compositions

Many of us learned to cite sources to avoid plagiarism or to give credit. Yet there are many more generative reasons to teach and learn citation. This essay offers a teacher’s perspective and a student’s perspective on our personal journeys toward viewing and practicing citation as a way of joyfully generating community with others. We describe our individual struggles, how anti-oppressive, anti-racist, and critical feminist scholars have shaped our thinking, and what we do within the classroom to practice a joyful, generative way of citing. We offer suggestions for how to hold ourselves and students accountable to more inclusive and community-oriented ways of citing by infusing reflective practice throughout the semester in college writing-intensive courses.

Teaching and Learning a Joyful Citation Praxis: Affective Relations for Fostering Community Through Our Compositions by Kylie E. Quave and Savannah Hagen Ohbi

RAFIL KROLL-ZAIDI SCAFFOLDING (MUMBAI). NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART ONLINE
itation is the practice that makes composition scholarly; it is the process that disciplinarily silos our academic fields.Yet citation, for some of us, is also a habit vulnerable to introducing misattribution, defensive choices, courtesy shout-outs, and even fear and shame.In this reflective essay, we co-authors (an instructor and a student) offer reflections on the evolution of our relationships to citation and how we have enacted and reacted to teaching choices resulting from those affective relations with citation praxis.
Kylie: As an anthropologist and faculty member teaching in a multidisciplinary writing program, I've had a long journey toward finding joy in the act of citation.That personal struggle, informed and shaped by ongoing conversations inside and outside my home discipline, has reformed my affective relation toward citational praxis; this re-formation has helped me overturn the usual script on citation for myself and helps me foster a more generative citation praxis with students.Here, I'm addressing anyone who cites, including myself.I want to hold myself accountable to citing conscientiously and with joyful purpose.And I intend to address others in a way that induces us all to lean into the joy and communal engagement that citation can produce.
Savannah: As a student in my second post-secondary year I am constantly citing.I strive to live a perpetual loop of learning, which underlies my deep love for education.Moreover, my position as an abolitionist reaffirms my core values of radical imagination, empathy, and joy, allowing me to critically evaluate the systems in which I engage every day.My adoption of joyful citation practices has wholly transformed my relationship with citing and thus elevated my entire academic journey.I believe all students can benefit from re-imagining citation norms and ought to have the space to explore the joy that comes with shifting those practices.
What is Citation For?And What Do Students Think It's For?
Citations generate, reify, and challenge disciplinary boundaries.Which works and whose works are cited foment not just bodies of knowledge but also determine who belongs to or does not belong to a discipline.Citation lends legitimacy to certain voices, while the absence of citation can silence, exclude, and marginalize others.However, scholars do not consistently respect disciplinary boundaries and, thus, citation does more than generate disciplines.Citation also links disconnected and already-related voices to amplify, reify, alter, or reject former ideas.The processes of reading, comparing, and refuting are the core of knowledge production: citation is not only the textual evidence of that work, but also an artifact that promotes and erases over some ideas.
But how have many students educated in the United States typically learned to cite?Students have learned to avoid accusations of academic dishonesty by tracking who they read, who they learn from, and who they paraphrase.Their introduction to a course via a syllabus is typically accompanied by a legalistic statement on plagiarism.Instruction about the usefulness and process of citation often reifies this preoccupation by focusing on citation as accounting, and by rewarding formatting adherence.
Savannah: My first week of college, what we students dub "syllabus week," was, in a word, overwhelming.I imagine this is a rather universal sentiment.What surprised me, however, was the seemingly endless renditions of the same threat-infused lecture on citing sources to avoid academic dishonesty used to open each of my classes.Learning citation became an all-powerful protection against the risk of sudden expulsion and academic death: our only life jacket in the dangerous plagiarism accusation-infested sea of academia.Professors made the fair assumption we had already been introduced to citation in high school, yet in doing so they skated over any meaningful discourse around the practice, choosing to instead focus on the dangers of what would happen if we cited incorrectly or not at all.Such rhetoric tackled the question of "why" we cite with a resoundingly un-nuanced answer --to not get caught plagiarizing.This introduction to citation was just as intimidating as my first encounter with it as a high school freshman five years ago and reinforced the transactional nature of such a practice.This legalistic enforcement of citation coupled with the lack of serious efforts to explain the complex evolution of citation practices made it a muchdreaded chore.I'd neglect that chore until 11:50 pm before a midnight deadline, when a quick scramble (and heavy reliance on algorithmic citation generators) allowed me to check the final and infuriatingly tedious item off before final submission.
Kylie: In my first-year research writing course, which is a general education required course of 17 students per section, I am fortunate to have a partner librarian visit once or twice a semester to assist students with source identification and use.In a recent semester, the wonderful librarian instructor, Megan Potterbusch, asked students in my course why they cite and to write their answers on a virtual Jamboard.Their responses focused on variations of "to give credit" or to avoid plagiarism (fig.1).When I ask this question verbally, results are similar.Seeing this exercise play out semester after semester, I realized that issues of citation primarily induced a fear response and exacerbated an antagonistic relationship students have developed with naming and using sources.I'm not convinced that this is something we all must endure, and I tell students this as well.Raising my hand from the audience of the librarian-led session, I'd offer some variation of "citation can be rewarding when we think about the conversation we're generating.What if we thought about it as more than formatting chores and avoiding dishonesty?"These sessions led me to conclude that I, too, had been in a toxic relationship with citation, but had somewhat moved through it.I wanted the same for the students, but I'd need to be more intentional in how that was incorporated into course structures.
Our realizations about citation being taught in formulaic, legalistic ways are not original.Others have pointed out the uselessness of writing instruction as an obsessive exercise in citation formatting and plagiarism C avoidance through uncritical naming and citing (Robillard andHoward 2008, Schick 2011).Writing handbooks describe citation as a utilitarian, functional matter (namely, citation supports your argument).Joseph Harris argues that citation-as typically taught and defined--is more a matter of typing than writing (2006: 28).Some composition guidebook authors go further in describing citation as a method for establishing a writer's authority, for making claims trustworthy, and for "rewarding" or "depriving" source authors (Heard 2016: 135, 137).However, most advice is functional, framing citation as some exchange of capital: "every citation is a transaction" (Heard 2016: 132).
Savannah: As a student, my frustration around citing included overwhelming anxiety about the threat of unintentionally claiming ownership over someone's work.My citation practice was simply a chase to identify who had ownership over an idea and, in cases where such ideas seemed rather universal, who had the luck of a pen and paper handy to be the first to write it down.I often found myself nervously searching for people to credit for information that was simply learned as a byproduct of being alive in one's particular social setting.Being a student in the 21st century means we have the privilege of easily accessing ample knowledge production, often digitally and constantly.It's awesome.It also presents an endless challenge: how can we become true critical thinkers when trapped in a constant cycle of regurgitation?Students become cornered into an endless search for the "owner" of an idea.When I start to write I can so often outline exactly what I want to say, yet the ensuing hours that follow searching for "the right authors to cite" makes the writing process one that engenders much self-doubt.
Compositionists have long argued that writing entails entering a scholarly conversation and making knowledge come into the world (e.g., rhetorician Kenneth Burke's parlor metaphor [1967], Bartholomae's inventing of the university [1986], and Swales's discourse communities [1990]).And writing studies scholars often plead for an end to plagiarism worries and a turn to a more nuanced, discursive practice of teaching attribution (Anson and Nelly 2010: 11).Overall, though, such norms do not appear to persist in introductory writing courses or in other college courses that include writing instruction across disciplines.
Would students develop a citation practice not primarily motivated by plagiarism fears if they were acquainted with more imaginative, inclusionary, joy-generating reasons for attribution rather than to robotically attribute names and dates to their thoughts?What if students instead first and primarily learned that citation is a dialogue for creating a new reality and not just a typographical chore?That the Works Cited page is more like what Dan Martin calls "textual DNA" or "the intertextual pieces of other texts an author used to build a new text" (2018)?That citation is not a unidirectional record of credit for things taken or even a gift to a colleague, but rather that citation is sowing, fertilizing, and tending to community?And what if students learned that citations are not inevitable formulae, but are rather choices made progressively in multiple phases?That we choose which terms and disciplines to search, which authors to read, where to read carefully and generously, which sources to ignore, and which sources can be readily dismissed from the conversation?One cannot possibly cite every source that has ever contributed to a subject; we select.But how are  Beginning From a Position of Shame Around Citation Kylie: As an instructor attempting to answer these questions to inform my pedagogy, I find that I have first had to grapple with my shame, fear, and discomfort in citation.Here I reconstruct how I moved beyond a pernicious relationship with citation, and thus, with writing.
As a first-generation college student (and a white woman from the rural US South who grew up in a mix of poverty and stability), I entered higher education without knowledge of cultural norms and unwritten rules.I struggled through writing from my first undergraduate semester, even though I had found academic success throughout K-12 education.In college I learned to identify as "not a writer," though I was highly motivated to hone my writing craft.In graduate school, I was labeled a weak writer in official departmental evaluations.As an art history undergraduate major who then pursued a graduate degree in anthropology, a subject in which I had no prior experience, it was clear to me that I hadn't read "the right people" and couldn't cite them during the performative conversations with peers in seminar rooms and happy hours.It didn't occur to me that citation patterns were anything other than merit-and credibility-based, though I now see the difference between how often works are cited and how valuable those works may be to society (Baas andFennell 2019, Lerman et al. 2022).I tried (reading and) citing based on what others cited… I never felt fully engaged in a conversation.It was as if there were inside jokes I couldn't access as an outsider looking in on the real work happening beyond my capacity.I struggled to cite the oft-cited because so many people seemed to be mis-citing these works and creating alternate meanings not originally intended by the authors.(I would later learn that erroneous and counter-factual citation is prevalent in scholarly writing [Hosseini et al. 2020], a phenomenon which Rekdal calls "academic urban legends" [2014].)Even in this essay, in which I am arguing for reenvisioning how we present citation to learners, I have included some citations out of obligation, to show I've read the same literature as imagined others who might gatekeep my ideas out of these pages.This sort of defensive citation doesn't benefit the writer, the reader, or the project of knowledge production.

After submitting the first draft of this essay, anthropologist Mwenza Blell published a compelling and insightful account of her experience as a graduate student citing beyond the canon of famous anthropological names (2023). What Blell describes is a similar environment to
what I observed as a student, yet Blell already knew as a graduate student that reading at the margins was devalued.Her mentors expected her to pretend she hadn't indeed learned from under-cited scholars, and she realized that citing beyond recognizable (typically White) names would be used against her to undermine her own intellectual contributions.Blell names the dichotomy of the oft-cited (White, recognizable) scholar and the under-cited, erased "Other" scholar as the "giant" and the "mule" (the latter evoking Zora Neale Hurston's character Nanny who describes [Black women as] "de mule uh de world" [1937]).(Ahmed 2013, Liu et al. 2023, Mott and Cockayne 2017, Smith et al. 2021, Tuck et al. 2015).I also came to understand that citation was a declaration of alliance, a public badge of membership.This realization came when a faculty hiring committee asked me to name my "top three theorists."I was a theory omnivore, seeing theory as an explanatory tool that I could choose from my utility belt depending on the questions I wanted to ask and the evidence available.But here was a search committee implying that I could signal my particular brand of belonging by naming three recognizable figures.I refused to answer and instead explained all of the above.I do not have to tell you I didn't get that job.

Re-directing Away From Defensive, Obligatory, Habitual Citation
Beyond a signal of who we're allied with, citation ought to move scholarly conversations forward.As readers and writers we enter into "unending conversations" already begun (as in Kenneth Burke's parlor metaphor [1967]), but so often the conversations begun by some thinkers are not forwarded; they are instead marginalized, left unread, or, more insidiously, they are read and subsequently ignored or pilfered.While we are not obligated to engage all the conversations already happening, the way we make those choices is steeped in our worldviews in unnamed ways that we must place at the center in our teaching.Scholars have discretion into which unending conversations they contribute and may choose to prioritize engaging those who were already being sidelined when they arrived.
Over the past decade, writers from historically excluded, marginalized, and minoritized backgrounds in particular have proliferated calls for awareness, reflection, and action-or praxis-that overcomes the tendency to cite in a way motivated by fear and the desire to cite all the "right things" (i.e., all the sources valued by those whose demographic homogeneity serves to uphold disparities [Clauset et al. 2015, Wapman et al. 2022]).These conversations bring to light issues of, as Christen A. Smith and Dominique Garrett-Scott put it, being "symbolically included but epistemologically erased" (2021: 19; italics in original).

Kylie: Learning of Christen Smith's international Cite
Black Women campaign helped me to belatedly realize these epistemic erasures are prominent (see Smith et al. 2021  Black women's work and intellectual contributions, and of appropriating their work (Edmonds 2020, Makhulu 2022) to elevate others who are deemed "more credible" (see Medina and Luna [2020] for how this works for other scholars of color, including Latinx/e writers).Audre Lorde had also made these points about extractive citation since at least the 1970s: "Do you ever really read the work of Black women?Did you ever read my words, or did you merely finger through them for quotation which you thought might valuably support an already conceived idea concerning some old and distorted connection between us?This is not a rhetorical question " (1984: 68).
Aboriginal and Indigenous scholars are making similar calls to problematize citation habits, reflect on them, and challenge disciplinary norms.Eve Tuck, K. Wayne Yang, and Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández explain the impetus for their Citation Practices Challenge: Indeed, our practices of citation make and remake our fields, making some forms of knowledge peripheral.We often cite those who are more famous, even if their contributions appropriate subaltern ways of knowing.We also often cite those who frame problems in ways that speak against us.Over time, our citation practices become repetitive; we cite the same people we cited as newcomers to a conversation.Our practices persist without consideration of the politics of linking projects to the same tired reference lists.( 2015) While normative citation habits tend toward consumption (read, collect ideas, credit them nominally), some Indigenous scholars are calling for a paradigm shift toward relationality instead.Zoe Todd (2016), Lauren Tynan (2020), and Max Liboiron (2021), for example, each urge scholars to avoid extractive citation, to engage with writers' ideas sincerely, to be in kinship with their research.Tynan critiques how reading research can be consumption within a supermarket of ideas and how we must reject that neoliberal way of extracting from writers (2020: 164).Kinship instead requires care and mutualism.

Savannah: One devastating outcome of citation can be the devaluing of expertise that isn't visible within the credentialism of academic spaces. A rigid hierarchy of academic worth is created when citation instruction
emphasizes formatting above all else.This privileges the already-privileged and leaves little space for alternative ways of knowing, knowledge learned from lived experiences, or scholarship that falls outside the Western, Global North canon.There are many consequences: poorer quality papers, but also a policing of who is allowed to belong comfortably and whose presence comes with an asterisk to explain their inclusion.Shifting these norms can instead create a space for students to see themselves as scholars, too.When students and others think more critically of the sources they are using and the people, practices, and ideas they are supporting and refuting, citation can empower everyone involved.
Citation ought to be conscientiously practiced with consideration of representation and equity (Chakravartty et al. 2018), but such concerns are the starting place rather than the ultimate goal.Mott and Cockayne (2017) have described citation as performative politics.Who and what we read and cite define the boundaries of who gets a say in knowledge production.Scholars (and non-scholars) whose work is excluded from citation or diminished in citation communities have a reduced influence in developing disciplines and transdisciplinary research.Particularly in the first author's home discipline of anthropology, the purportedly "essential" citations are disproportionately written by white men (Bolles 2013, Davis andMulla 2023).Privileging those voices silences and erases the perspectives of those not afforded unearned dominance: "citation is equally a technology for reproducing sameness and excluding difference" (Mott and Cockayne 2017: 960).

Teaching Toward Joyful Citation
Kylie: Teaching undergraduate research-based writing helped me connect all these lessons with practices for a new relationship to citation and thus to writing: I began to see citation as an act of gratitude for writers who have made me think deeply and in new ways.Being in a writing classroom rather than in an anthropology classroom gave me space to critically consider how my prior attitudes about citation had affected my instruction habits.Working in a writing program helped me feel I had the freedom and time to read scholarship I was interested in, rather than obligation to the anthropological canon.Liberation from disciplinary limits led me to read the brilliance of Katherine McKittrick, who models the joys, responsibilities, and possibilities of citation in a chapter from Dear Science and Other Stories called "Footnotes (Books and Papers Scattered about the Floor)" (2020).Bending genres, McKittrick urges the reader to consider that "the works cited, all of them, when understood as in conversation with each other, demonstrate an interconnected story that resists oppression" (2020: 28).Pulling on the threads of such interconnectedness, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein describes how ideas are made in communities and are rarely the result of a single genius working in isolation, including even the work of Albert Einstein (2021: 55-56).
Savannah: Current citation praxis may unwittingly advance this myth of "single geniuses working in isolation" critiqued by Prescod-Weinstein (2021) and normalize the idea that a single mind, absent from community and collaboration, can (and is often expected to) produce scholarship (2021: 55-56).In this lies perhaps the most dangerous part of the current model of how citation is taught: that knowledge is something to be capitalized.To be owned.This is the backbone of an ever-present student fear--that improper citation is tantamount to theft and will be punished as such.
The paradox of working alongside my peers to build reference lists populated with "et al." while still under the assumption that single individuals could somehow maintain ownership over entire thought processes took a while to sink in.Why is our current citation process not reflective of actual scholarship in practice?Learning is collaborative by nature and the way we document such learning should be, too.Instead, we remain tied to a fear-forward rhetoric that threatens the very collaboration learning and discovery necessitate.Given all this, what if we stop thinking about citation as a matter of elevating single authors by naming them and instead as including the communities within which people are writing and thinking?What if we resisted fetishizing authorship, especially single authorship and first authorship (see the Society for Cultural Anthropology's collection on coauthorship as feminist practice [Kotni et al. 2020]), and instead recognized and named the webs of knowledge production in which we all participate?Questioning assumptions and norms around citation and authorship are not only useful for seeking out solutions to inequities in knowledge production, but raising these questions with students helps them move beyond a robotic, box-checking citation praxis.
Citation Is Relationship.Is Communal.Is Not Arbitrary.Is Not Automatic.
Realities are made when we cite.The act changes us as the writer.It could change the reader.All of that can happen in ways that result in better social and individual outcomes if we think through the many possible reverberations of our citation choices.

Kylie: When I cite someone's writing, I feel as if I'm posting them a note: "hi, you may not know me, but you inspire me to think more expansively, and I want readers to know what a difference you made for me so they, too, can learn from you!" This is perhaps a less intimate version of acknowledgments; I have no right to claim to know you, but I know what you've written, and I want to thank you and celebrate you, dear writer. Indeed, where are the boundaries between citation and acknowledgment anyway?
At times, those relegated to acknowledgements may have played a greater role in shaping our ideas than those on the works cited page.This is another thread of citation praxis that warrants questioning.

Savannah: Class discussions have always been my favorite part of school. When fear of academic expulsion and the stress of correctly verbalizing full citations are no longer centered in our conversations about learning, discussions are much more accessible, collaborative, vibrant, and engaging. I love talking about the sources I've read and how they build on previous courses or research done by my peers. This is where I feel as though I am collaborating with authors. Where I am in conversation with them.
When students are unbound from disciplinary silos and encouraged to creatively explore connections between sources, we can come to citation from a place of gratitude.The ease of building ideas and connecting sources that is easily found within classroom discussions should be just as present in norms for writing with sources.Writers can transform their reference lists into a space meant to recognize not simply whose name goes with what idea but instead articulate the importance and power of each work.Citation can be used as a vehicle for collaboration, turning writers and their sources into co-creators as their ideas grow together to generate new scholarship.
Of course, citing someone is not only developing relationships: accruing citations augments a researcher's metrics of academic success, whether one believes those are a fair way to assess our contributions or not.Citations are counted to rank academic job candidates and to quantify merit for tenure and promotion.Advice to evaluators on how to count citation credits in a purportedly "unbiased, proper way" has even earned precious space in the pages of the Chronicle of Higher Education (Romesburg 2019).Citation promotes an individual's career and engaging citations beyond "the canon" (read: the white, masculine, middleclass body of work) may ultimately contribute toward generating representation and equity in our academic fields.Chanda Prescod-Weinstein explains how white empiricismin which scholars from marginalized backgrounds (especially Black women) are held to much higher standards of evidence than white men when making research claims-shapes how scholars invoke sources and evidence to produce knowledge (2020).In citation practices, this manifests as offering white men's research under a presumption of empiricism and demanding a higher threshold of evidence for marginalized others.This type of epistemic oppression "involves a denial of a knower's competence based on ascribed identity" (Prescod-Weinstein 2020: 425).

Bringing Joyful Citation Into the Classroom
Kylie: Amid this struggle for credibility, citation can also be a rewarding affective experience in which the writer is fulfilled and joyful in contributing to a scholarly conversation.Many developing writers experience writing (including citation) as a painful process.Once I saw students in my courses fixated on the formatting chore, I resolved to identify just and equitable ways to think through citing sources, which unexpectedly has led to a whole host of other positive outcomes intimately tied to enacting justice and equity in knowledge production: joy and pleasure.When I speak of the joy experienced in citation, I refer to a specific version of joy that creates a feeling of harmony with other humans and a sense of freedom of thought (Johnson 2020: 7-8).

Pleasure activists believe that by tapping into the potential goodness in each of us we can generate justice and liberation, growing a healing abundance where we have been socialized to believe only scarcity exists. […]
Pleasure activism includes work and life lived in the realms of satisfaction, joy, and erotic aliveness that bring about social and political change.(brown 2019: 13) What brown urges is that we behave in ways that actually feel good.A citational practice filled with fear, guilt, and shame results from our bodies and minds telling us to alter course.I don't want students or anyone else to feel such anguish in writing.I want students to know that they may not enter a scholarly conversation that has formed due to meritocracy, but rather one molded by the social and political variables of disciplinary knowledge production.I want them to know that they are also choosing which sources to engage (not just consume); that their choices may elevate certain actors and leave others out; that they are subjecting their readers to the works they cite.Not all ideas are equally valuable, and there is not always room for everyone to enter the unending scholarly conversation.But who is left out of the conversation shouldn't be determined by false hierarchies and prestige economies.I want to feel citations as an act of gratitude, and not in the sense of a reward for the academic merit game, and I want students to find that, too.
These joys and pleasures go hand in hand with more equitable and just citation practices.Approaching citation in pursuit of joy ought to result in a more inclusive and less extractive citation practice, while orienting our citation toward equity also ought to have pleasurable outcomes (fig.2).
Figure 2. If we start from a place of questioning the reproduction of the scholarly canon without reflection, and if we recognize the social power of citation, that can lead us to practicing a generative and community-oriented citation practice.Those habits can result in joy and pleasure, while such an orientation may also lead to richer, more robust knowledge, as well as epistemic justice.Dotted lines connect the latter two outcomes because it is possible that writers could approach citations as generative in ways that merely reproduce the status quo, which would not in turn lead to epistemic justice and a more robust knowledge base.
To lead students toward these more productive and generative relationships with citation, instructors can talk to them more intentionally from early in the semester about how there can be a pleasure in conscientiously making these choices and considering the ways they engender community.If we think about and teach citation as an act of creating relationships, we may be more apt to take seriously the imperative to faithfully represent writers' ideas, to think deeply and authentically with their ideas, and to give writers the benefit of the doubt when we don't understand or agree.Moreover, brown's pleasure activism doesn't ask us to exclude voices through feigned scarcity: it is generative and honors the abundance within us and between us.And here we ought to recall one of brown's principles of emergent strategy: "There is a conversation in the room that only these people at this moment can have.Find it" (2017: 41).If we apply that abundant inclusion to citation, it invites us to expand the number of voices we bring into the conversation, citing more rather than less, honoring more kinds of contributions and expertise.These are values at odds with academia's orientation toward singular geniuses and exclusive accolades, and we must explain this tension to students.
Before even asking students to consider the differences in citation styles, we can invite them to question what they think they know about the purposes of citation (see Appendix 1).Ask them to consider what impacts citation choices can have, what rewards and costs there may be, and to whom.What we want them to arrive at are realizations about how citing is crafting community and initiating possibilities for future dialogue.We can ask them to look for evidence in course readings of how citing can be a multidirectional interaction with colleagues and others who we recognize, celebrate, and elevate.Relationships are not only built in the spaces between the writer and the authors they cite, but as writers we are also introducing sources to each other.Perhaps the sources have already met elsewhere, but in some cases the writer brings them into dialogue for the first time.Students can look for and trace networks of citation through visualizations that they (co-)create such as concept maps and timelines of scholarly writings (see Appendix 2).
We ought to focus the re-calibration of citation pedagogies on affirming matters, and on the potential benefits to all, but we can also ask students to look at the harmful outcomes possible in citation choices.For example, naming the most cited works merely because they are already the most cited doesn't move scholarship forward; it only satisfies an exclusionary status quo.
When we consider citation decisions as crafting community, it gives us license to then conscientiously decide when to not tip our hat to someone; it allows us to discern where our inclusive abundance need not apply to all kinds of knowledge producers (Mansfield et al. 2019, Souleles 2020).
As Dan Souleles prompts in reference to academic predators, do you really need that citation in your bibliography?Are you citing someone simply because of their prestigious name?Are they really the only source on that subject?Granted, this is not a popular stance, as explained by Brian Leiter (2018), a philosopher and legal scholar, who explicitly forbids excluding harmful colleagues from citation habits.Leiter's essay was a response to Nikki Usher's own advice column (2018) on the conundrum of citing a serial harasser when a peer reviewer required it.But why is the dominant assumption that one must promote the most-known name on any given subject, regardless of their history of harm?Aren't there usually others who have done the work, too?Why continue to prioritize the same actors?I seek joy in the freedom of not having to cite in these defensive ways that work against building community (see Appendix 3).
If citation is a pro forma matter of citing who's already been cited, then what is the point?How are we participating in a process of forging a better future with our scholarship if we perpetually list the same voices and ideas?Let's teach students and ourselves that citation is not a compulsory act under threat of sanction, but rather an opportunity for community and dialogue.
How Teaching the Joyful, Pleasurable Citation Praxis Is Good For Teachers, Too "I know teaching is a survival technique.It is for me and I think it is in general; the only way real learning happens.Because I myself was learning something I needed to continue living.And I was examining it and teaching it at the same time I was learning it.I was teaching it to myself aloud" -Audre Lorde (Lorde and Rich 1981: 719, italics in original).
Kylie: When we teach, we are actively creating realities in our discipline.We are setting up expectations students may carry with them well beyond our classrooms.We are also creating lived realities for ourselves.Transforming my instruction in citation beyond formatting and checklists has brought unanticipated joys.Watching students work through hard questions about why some authors are cited and not others, and how they are actively participating in the scholarly conversations themselves has been immensely rewarding.I do not claim to have found all the solutions, but I can recommend to others that they also allow for writing instruction to include considerations of epistemic inequities, and the ways that knowledge becomes power through and with citation.
Savannah: Kylie's class was the first time an educator pushed me to think critically about citing.To reflect on its importance and understand its power.These conversations linked to themes of decolonization and deconstruction of white supremacy within academia.In any form of equity work, joy should be centered.I was struck by how this course could transform a chore I had primarily done out of fear into a practice that not only worked to dismantle oppressive cycles of privilege within academia, but which also genuinely made the writing process more fulfilling and joyful.
But how do we truly change the norms around teaching such an entrenched practice?I was lucky enough to encounter an educator early in my academic career who gave me the tools and space to reevaluate how I approach citation, but I also sense this is rare.The responsibility of shifting one's citation practice should not fall on students or educators alone-instead both can support each other in more meaningful citation methods.Ones that are infused with joy.
One of the biggest steps is shifting from a focus on plagiarism and academic dishonesty related to citing.Instead, we must all work to reframe the practice as a conversation-one that encourages collaboration rather than threatens it.This requires intentional time and space to allow students to explore their understanding of citation and for educators to share the meaningful reasons behind why we cite.It is not enough to simply tell students to cite more marginalized authors or "allow" them to venture away from peer-reviewed sources.Changing the way we understand citation practices can only be accomplished through compassionate conversations.These talks must directly tackle the purpose and possibilities of citation.Like all equity work, this deeper understanding does not come from performative acts and half-baked disclaimers.It is not a throwaway paragraph on the syllabus or a revamp of the citation lecture.Rather, it is a continuous journey that requires time and effort; however, it is not without reward.As I continue my college education, I am hopeful that more professors will hold space for me and my peers to explore what citation is, to collaborate together, and, perhaps most importantly, to center joy.
What do we want teachers, students, and ourselves to be accountable for? 2. To read generously and with resistance to urges to "efficiently" consume others' ideas.Instead, we will read to listen.We will strive for relations.
3. To cite not for the performance of "knowing the right names" but rather with sincerity of interest in what the source brings to the unending conversation.

4.
To not think of citation practice as a box-filling endeavor: we will not count identities or quantify diversity.We will strive for holistic, multivocal ways of knowing and asking about the world.
5. ChatGPT were just becoming widely available; higher education has since catastrophized on what this could mean for teaching, especially teaching writing.There is much to be said on how good writing instruction disincentivizes GenAI use.However, it is most relevant to this essay to posit that any writing habit that infuses joy and pleasure into the process may be a productive way to move students away from relying on it.Resorting to ChatGPT may be due to a person's attitude about the worth of their education, but it may also be due to avoidance, fear, and shame around writing and citing.Intentionally and iteratively re-orienting our classroom practices toward joys in citation may circumvent such struggles among students.
What have become the norms in teaching citation are not serving students or the disciplines in which they write.We hope for students and colleagues to see citation not merely as the avoidance of dishonesty, but as much more.We may not always know the particulars of why and how students have struggled to develop a healthy relationship with citation, but we can draw from our own shame-filled and fear-inducing experiences as a starting place here.As teacher and student, we each acknowledge we may continue to encounter spaces where citation is centered on fear and intimidation around plagiarism and formatting, but we are each committed to centering a more reflexive citation practice.And we now find joy in thinking back on all the works we've read beyond the "canons" of our disciplines that show us worlds we wouldn't otherwise find on our own.We grasp that re-imagining citation practices involves more emotional labor; we believe that labor can be rechanneled in pleasurable, joyful ways.If we're going to be doing emotional work, it ought to be generative rather than exclusionary.We don't have to be in a toxic relationship with citation.We cannot recalibrate these relationships toward abundance and joy with one-off interventions; it must be part of the fabric of our courses and our writing practices beyond our roles as teacher and student.Joy is a form of resistance to the structures that ask us to exclude, rank, and marginalize knowledge producers; we each are accountable for intentionally taking part in the transformative process.

Appendix 1
There is no single moment in which students learn the purpose of citation in my (Kylie's) writing courses; my pedagogy iteratively visits aspects of citation, moving from observation to reflecting on our attitudes, to taking actions.I do not wish to prescribe specific activities to readers because I believe that we each must examine our citation habits and then be transparent with students about that as they form their own citation praxis.
First, students must consider citation as a problem to solve: they write a letter to an acquaintance/relative/friend about sources from the course and must decide how to offer the reader enough information to find/understand the sources.This positions students to see citation as a technology, or a problem to be solved, rather than a formula, and shows them how different citation modes fulfill different rhetorical purposes.
Next, I prompt students about a specific journal article: Finally, I ask them to reflect on these questions, all of which we revisit throughout the semester:

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How is this relevant to who you are as a researcher-writer relative to a research area?
• How can this inform how you research?How you write about research?For whom you write?
Appendix 2 The courses I (Kylie) teach position students to become familiar enough with an area of scholarship that they can ask a new question about it and write about it in ways that critically evaluate how they use sources (or ignore/exclude sources).Additionally, I ask students to principally consider citation as joyfully forming relationships with knowledge producers.One strategy for shifting their citation labor is to require students to use a particular open-source citation manager (e.g., Zotero) so they can focus on joyful, generative citation rather than formatting chores.I tell them repeatedly that the labor they might otherwise spend on scrutinizing formatting can be re-directed to joyful citation praxis.
I iteratively urge students to describe how sources form knowledge networks: We collaboratively annotate readings before class (in Perusall), then build with in-class discussion.As students develop their individual research projects, they create concept maps as graphical representations of connections between sources.I ask them to follow webs of citation by seeing who has cited whom since a piece was published and in what ways (by chasing citations through Web of Knowledge and Google Scholar).When they propose their research projects, they must explain the ways they are finding sources beyond using the library skills they've been taught: they must reflect on whose voices might be missing and how they can go about finding them.Their research must also include non-scholarly yet credible sources, urging them to see that expertise can take many forms and that those with academic positions are not the sole arbiters of knowledge.
During the research paper outlining stages, students also submit a series of timelines of sources from their research.These are graphical timelines made in Canva where students illustrate how sources are in conversation with each other over time, a visualization of the Burkean Parlor.I also prompt them to again consider who is missing, what marginalized perspectives can be centered, and what other patterns of knowledge production emerge from the citation networks.
After a first draft of their research papers, I ask students to highlight all the places they have quoted an author and to defend the inclusion of each quote.They must consider who they quoted and the author's relationship to their research.Students defend these choices to each other during a class discussion.I do not prescribe how to make these choices, but rather aim for students to ask more questions about how/why they quote.They are required to include multi-source citations to compare multiple sources and to go beyond merely paraphrasing and quoting one source at a time.
When students submit the final versions of their research papers, I ask them to include a reflective statement that addresses "how you thought about citation as building relationships."

Appendix 3
Sometimes excluding a source is a way of creating and tending to community.I (Kylie) illustrate this to students using case studies of scholars who have been found responsible for exploiting their students or mentees and whose research has also been revealed to be lacking in integrity in related ways.I do not tell them what to do with dishonest researchers, but rather ask them how including everyone might be counter-productive to generating a more joyful, community-oriented web of knowledge.
To model methods for harm reduction, I tell my students about ways that harassment and abuse have affected scholars in my area of specialization, and share a bibliography I created to recognize, elevate, and include scholars other than a dishonest, exploitative scholar in our citation community.We do not have to talk specifically about those we exclude but we can orient our joyful abundance in other directions.

Works Cited
This reference list is an outcome of our lived joyful citation practice, but is, to a lesser extent, shaped by the fact that we wrote this essay to submit for peer review.As we crafted this essay, we occasionally referenced prior works due to defensive motivations.In other words, we sometimes cited works for the benefit of imagined peer reviewers and other doubtful readers: to ensure no one would think we didn't do our homework or that we were presenting our joyful praxis as more original than it is.However, most of the sources cited were joyfully engaged in conversation.This list is an artifact of our generative relationships with the sources and the delight of seeing in new ways, and an exertion of gratitude for what we learn from these writers.

FIGURE 1 .
FIGURE 1. AUTHOR'S SCREENSHOT OF STUDENT RESPONSES TO AN IN-CLASS QUESTION FROM A LIBRARIAN INSTRUCTIONAL PARTNER IN A SPRING 2021 FIRST-YEAR WRITING COURSE.STUDENTS WERE PROMPTED TO ANSWER: "WHY DO WE CITE?" THE SMALLER FONT IS WHAT THE INSTRUCTOR (THE AUTHOR) WROTE ON THE JAMBOARD SPACE ("TO TAKE PART IN A COMMUNITY CONVERSATION").NOTE THE FREQUENT MENTIONS OF "CREDIT," "GIVE CREDIT," AND "GET CREDIT" BY STUDENT RESPONDENTS.

FIGURE 2 .
FIGURE 2. ORIENTING CITATION TOWARD EQUITY ALSO OUGHT TO HAVE PLEASURABLE OUTCOMES

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To learn what we can about the writers whose work we engage.To ask what shapes how they know what they know, and how it reveals our own gaps in experience and understanding.
on the principles of this urgently needed movement).Smith's work helped me see that my discomfort with citation choices had a name and a suite of causes.Who is credited with brilliant ideas and who is spoken over and spoken for are not arbitrary.While universities position themselves as oases of multiculturalism and celebrate the inclusion of diverse participants, there is nevertheless a pattern of devaluing http://radicalteacher.library.pitt.eduNo. 128 (Spring 2024) DOI 10.5195/rt.2024.1219

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Observe how citations are formatted in this paper.Observe where they are included, how many are included in each instance, and what kind of sources they are pointing to.Tell me about one thing you learned about academic citation practices by observing them here.