Document Type
Article
Publication Date
10-2025
Publisher
YUMPU Publishing
Abstract
In her 2016 dissertation on citation practices, Elizabeth Frances Bergeron Chamberlain interviews then-editors Kelly Ritter and Jonathan Alexander about the trends in citation practices of submissions to College English and College Composition and Communication. Bergeron Chamberlain notes that the editors observed that newcomers to the field tended to include too many citations; conversely, Chamberlain cites Paul Kei Matsuda and Christine Tardy’s article “Voice in Academic Writing,” which finds the opposite: a lack of citations was attributed to newcomers in the field (Chamberlain 2016, 91). Chamberlain concludes, “Indeed, if insiders universally feel that newcomers are citing ‘wrong,’ it suggests that we should be paying more attention to disciplinary citation practices—in graduate education, in our journal guidelines, and in our scholarship” (Chamberlain 2016, 108). In this article, I extend this recommendation beyond newcomers to advocate for more experienced scholars across the field of rhetoric and composition as a whole to pay more attention to the diversity and inclusion in their citation practices. This discussion regards the terms of “diversity” and “inclusion” in connection with the frequency of scholars of color appearing in works cited pages and bibliographies. Affect provides a rhetorical frame for analyzing academic citations, following Shirley K. Rose’s definition of citation as an affective “courtship ritual” guiding the purposeful inclusion of citations. For BIPOC (Black Indigenous People of Color) scholars, the lack of affect, or the felt conditions of forces and movement experienced by writers, could account for the uncritical exclusion of scholars of color in works cited pages and bibliographies and the tokenizing of particular scholars of color.
Recommended Citation
Medina, Cruz. "Decolonizing Citation Matters." Latinx Writing and Rhetoric Studies Vol. 2, No. 1, October 2025/2026, p.24–48. https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/read/71319299/lwrs-october-2025-2026-volume-2-issue-1/31
Comments
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