Call for Proposals for Special Collection: some bullshit: citation
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some bullshit: citation
Dear reader/professional,
We’d love to open this email by being a little more honest by way of a few questions: is the project of radical librarianship anything but something to help careers (and we stand amidst those careers)? Anything but nice little (fading) DEI check boxes? Nice little lines on professional documents? Nice market-based invitations to speak that receive checks and checks those little DEI boxes (rip), getting on those professional documents’ little lines?
Even though we understand this project, we often have lost the priorities and paths of the project, terming ourselves and work radical as if the word was some kind of gold star, without any consideration of the material affects and effects of those who, historically, have been and are radical. As if the minimum wage job serving the state is, with kindness and charity, somehow radical? That is, how are we really being radical ? What are we criticizing? The state being the state? God forbid we are critical of our own selves serving the state (willingly, and with morals!).
Either way, we’d like to offer something that might be termed radical or falls in the radical librarianship project. We’d like to shout it and scream it and not be in a journal but on billboards and in mail packages but alas, we work these state jobs that do not spare expenses for billboards, and our stolen goods from the institution is even limited by the surveillance on xerox machines now. However, we’d love to maybe garner comrades or inspiration for refusal.
Yes, here we are with an offer to engage with citation practice. The standard practice of the Journal of Radical Librarianship is any standard citation practice, and we reject that and those standards completely. Our citational politics manifesto begins: (Academic) citation is a representational practice of hollow, ruined potential professional accumulation of intellectual capital.
Considering this, are you interested in publishing along the lines of (or against) our manifesto? We, as people who are (in name) invested in “radical” librarianship, should be able to at least be honest, and if we’d like to stick with these systems, or we begrudgingly do so, then let us be truthful. How can we understand, and receive, something that isn’t in the rigid lines of professional academic ritual?
Indeed, we have researched and read, thought and discussed and disagreed and questioned a lot of the ideas (and citations!) we bring up. Nothing is new, after all! Are we suggesting reform? Sure! I guess! Are we suggesting revolution? No! This is a journal. We’re making a special issue! It’s called some bullshit: citation. Our citation practices are woefully weak and we are the ones who are supposed to be referencing! Are we so dull and flat in our understandings of labor, instruction, and knowledge organization? And if so, can we just admit it?
If this makes no sense to you, we offer a few brooding questions to invite some musings, answers, or more questions to:
· How honest can you be about your citational practice?
· How do you know what you know?
· How are we really being radical with our current structure of citational practice? (Or any of the other questions we’ve already asked in this silly little email.)
· See more in our submission link.
We’d be glad to connect and think together about potential submissions with any further questions, so do reach out and there’s more about the project in the links below:
Here’s the link for submissions. Here’s the link for complaints.
Very, extremely sincerely,
jaime ding + jorge lopez-mcknight
(somebøllshit@gmail.com)
