Ethel Baraona Pohl shares in this text, initially delivered as a lecture, her thoughts on how we need to constantly contest and question how we share knowledge to imagine other possible worlds and which are the sources of those imaginations.

Some Notes invites guest contributors to write additional texts to be part of  the Urgent Pedagogies (UP) archive, or to contribute with brief responses consisting of notes and reflections to already existing pieces in the archive or to the project itself.

Nina Jäger, for Dear Reader, Dear Friend. A Continent. special edition. London, 2018. 

Brief Wandering From the Politics of Citation to Other Matters of Care

Ethel Baraona Pohl

I want this brief text to be an assemblage of thoughts and words, a sort of cadavre exquis where words that are not mine are intertwined with a few of my own thoughts, because it’s the only possible way to really represent how we learn and how we teach.  

In that sense, I want to emphasise how the politics of citation are clearly related with Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ concept ‘las ecologías de los saberes,’ where inclusion of diverse knowledges and the ways in which we refer to them are also a matter of care. The title of this text and some of my ramblings about the topic come from a diverse set of references, from books and research projects to dreams and conversations with friends.
 
In other words, we need to constantly contest and question how we share knowledge to imagine other possible worlds and which are the sources of those imaginations, because as my dear friend Francisco Díaz once said,[1] the blank page is always full of previous inscriptions.
 
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—Can we talk about the politics of citation as a matter of care?
 
If we consider the relationship between the act of referencing, the politics of citation, and footnotes as a form of care and affection, it would be possible to understand these practices not only as recognition and respect for those —architects, writers, poets, critical thinkers— from whom one learns, but also as a form of collective care in relation to how knowledge is created and distributed. In her book Living a Feminist Life,[2] feminist writer and researcher Sara Ahmed points “Citation is how we acknowledge our debt to those who came before; those who helped us find our way when the way was obscured because we deviated from the paths we were told to follow. In this book, I cite feminists of color who have contributed to the project of naming and dismantling the institutions of patriarchal whiteness” Laurent Berlant and Kathleen Stuart affirms that “the performance called format can hold the things we think with: encounters, a word, a world, a wrinkle in the neighborhood of what happened. Even if some cites look like direct sources, all things are indirect sources, in truth.”[3]
 
Similar ideas were mentioned decades earlier by Ivan Illich on his book Deschooling Society,[4] where he stated “the current search for new educational funnels must be reversed into the search for their institutional inverse: educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring.” And bell hooks follows up this line of thinking by saying that “learning must be understood as an experience that enriches life in its entirety.”[5] But we are now witnessing what can be described as ‘the academization of care,’ and with that, new models of exploitation and competitiveness emerge from the commodification and loss of meaning of this concept, as most necessary concepts with potential often start to fall from overuse. Mika Hannula beautifully relates to this with his words “The double act of digging deeper into the nuances of how to give content to a concept (or image, sign, act, symbol, etc.) and the aim of creating productive clashes of situated interactions is not so much about producing more talk as about generating sites and situations for learning again how to listen—and to listen carefully.”[6]
 
Then the big challenge ahead is how to demand openness and generosity and acknowledge that no learning can happen without a practice of care to sustain it.
 
—How to resist the asymmetries of access to knowledge?
 
To understand education as a matter of care, is relevant to question who controls the networks of production and distribution of knowledge, and how they do it, recalling what Dubravka Sekulić pointed out when she wrote “the people building alternative networks of distribution [of knowledge] also build networks of support and solidarity.”[7]
 
Even though there are many attempts to further advance in the field of the conventional citational structures, in academic circles the tendency of disciplines to be self referential is still common, and consequently it affects the way we research, select, and disseminate knowledge. In the past decades we have witnessed a growing monopoly of academic journals with an economic system based on the privatization and commodification of knowledge via paywalls and expensive subscription fees, which provokes what Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi describes[8] as “the subjugation of research to the narrow interest of profit and economic competition.” Professor Kecia Ali suggests “I want [my colleagues] to look at their research bibliographies and note who is missing from the list and why. And because citation is only one element in a scholarly ecosystem, I want them to look at who they invite to present in speaker series and on panels and who they ask to contribute to journal special issues and edited volumes and festschrifts. I want us to read differently and write differently.”[9] When we decide to mention certain bodies of work, we’re giving visibility to some ideas, while at the same time, we are excluding other voices, therefore some of the most important questions to ask ourselves are: who appears and who doesn’t? and, why?

—Are you ready to abandon competition?
 
“Competition is stupid in the age of the general intellect,” argues Berardi[10] and I must add that the way we reference the work of others is not innocent. The act of acknowledging is an act of responsibility and it can be a useful tool for...