On the Politics and Practice of Citation: A Conversation, Part 2

nicholae cline, in conversation with Michael Kirby, Kimberly Forero-Arnias, Joseph Kevin Sebastian, Gianna Brassil, Mimosa Shah, Elise Mills, and Joseph Kevin Sebastian, Gianna Brassil, Mimosa Shah, Elise Mills, and lawrence maminta (in initial speaking order).

Abstract

(Academic) citation is a representational practice of hollow, ruined potential professional accumulation of intellectual capital. This contribution explores the interview as conversational form to refuse the isolation and atomization that structure much academic labor, including LIS research and scholarship. Rather than treating the author as a singular locus of knowledge production, it stages collective thinking as a method—making visible the relational lineages, political commitments, and affective stakes that conventional academic genres often obscure. Grounded in a critique of (academic) citation as a technology of enclosure and professional accumulation, the piece showcases what becomes possible when citation is approached not as an apparatus of intellectual property and metricized legitimacy, but as an occasion for vulnerability, contradiction, pleasure, and shared study.

Across the dialogue, contributors surface divergent and sometimes challenging responses to the call: lawrence’s unapologetically communist indictment of ivory- tower cowardice amidst the ongoing genocide in Gaza; Mimosa’s meditations on extraction, effacement, and haunting within violent institutional archives; Gianna and Elise’s insistence on embodied citation and refusal of polished academic performance; Michael’s prefigurative vision of librarianship otherwise; Kevin’s wrestling with generative AI and the ethics of citing one’s sins; and Kim’s grappling with form itself as both gateway and barrier to understanding how knowledge moves through relationality rather than extraction. Thus, the conversation offers not only arguments about citational politics, but a demonstration of how knowledge production might be reoriented toward collective struggle, collaborative meaning-making, and liberatory horizons.