Friday Notes, June 10, 2022
Dear Friends —
It’s graduation weekend at our house — a twofer, celebrating both a 2022 college graduate and a 2020 graduate of the same college who is finally getting her Covid-delayed rite of passage. The birds are well and truly out of the nest and ready to fly. And I am thinking about the past and the future.
The Aymara people of the Andes think of the past as being in front of their eyes, because they can see it clearly; the future, unknown, is behind them. This is the opposite of the way most other cultures conceptualize past and future. In English all references to time are based on the future being ahead of us, and imply the conceit of being able to see what’s coming. But I think the Aymara have it exactly right. We cannot predict the opportunities or hardships to come, and you risk heartbreak by overcommitting to the path we imagine to be in front of us.
For an extraordinary commencement speech, on just this topic, take a moment to listen to or read the thoughts of Steve Jobs. Here’s a taste:
[Y]ou can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
Few systems perpetuate themselves more efficiently than academia, particularly at the graduate level. Today’s professors train tomorrow’s; journal editors and reviewers enforce disciplinary frameworks, vocabulary, and norms. Every aspect of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging is bound up with the struggle between established ways of knowing and teaching and novel perspectives.
Within a system that resists change, citation practices do a lot of the work. How much a scholar is cited is a measure of that person’s influence on the field, and contributes — sometimes in formulaic ways — to hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions. And whether you are cited or not turns out to be highly correlated with whether you are from a dominant or a minoritized group.
There’s lots of evidence that conventional citation practices yield demographically skewed results. In analysis after analysis, bibliometric researchers have shown that papers with two male authors will be cited far more than papers with two female authors, even adjusting for other factors. And in a study described in this article in Nature, Cassidy Sugimoto and colleagues compared citations of White male authors with those of women or Black and Latinx individuals.
Not only were these authors more likely to publish on less-cited topics — such as racial discrimination, gender-based violence and immigrants — but, even within those topics, their publications were less likely to be referenced than was work from other authors. White and Asian authors were over-represented among citations, whereas Black and Latinx authors were under-represented. Across all racial groups, women were less cited than men.
It’s the experience of not being given visibility and proper credit that has led to the “citational justice” movement, which seeks to increase the diversity of scholars that are cited in academic papers. In addition to advocating for journals to encourage inclusive citation practices, the movement-builders have created a tool so authors can check their bibliographies to see whether they skew in one demographic direction or another. Like the “no all-male panels” advocacy, this will not untie the Gordian knot of injustice, but it will loosen the bonds that keep academia tethered to the past.
(On a related note, if you’re a Twitter user, you can analyze the gender distribution of your those you follow and those who follow you in less than one minute using this handy tool.)
This podcast is worth a listen: “I’ve Aways Struggled with My Weight. Losing It Didn’t Mean Winning.” (Also in print here.)
Okay, gotta go cheer on the next generation. Have a good weekend,
-Ruth