#LILAC23 Are western referencing styles a form of oppressive academic practices?

Pam McKinney here live blogging from the #LILAC23 conference at the final session of the day which is a panel session with Caroline Ball, Tom Peach, Diane Pennington and Ludi Price. The panel spoke about the research they had done to prepare for the panel, and there’s a lot of research about the politics of citation, and the way that certain types of knowledge are neglected by referencing systems, and question the process of referencing. So many referencing styles are rooted in a western cultural environment, western meaning structures, and  designed largely by UK and US. universities. Academics are often very opinionated about referencing systems, and have wildly differing views about the breadth and applicability of specific referencing systems.

Disabled students in particular find it really difficult to engage with referencing. For example referencing that uses footnotes is really hard to use with a screen reader. All academic structures, not just referencing but also journal databases and information products uses the western alphabet and western naming conventions.. Chinese characters for names can be translated in very different ways in the Roman alphabet sometimes the family name is capitalised, but this isn’t necessarily used by everyone, and it can be impossible, for example, to tell what a person’s gender is from the western translation of their name.In an environment of scholarly publishing that prizes metrics, if non-western authors can’t track their citations they are disadvantaged. Students sometimes avoid referencing non western authors because they are scared of getting the name wrong and being penalised for poor referencing.

Very few referencing systems can deal with oral or traditional knowledge. Often it’s passed as “personal communication” but this downgrades the value of this information. A chat you have with someone is not the same authority as knowledge that has been handed down through generations in a particular community. Wikipedia is currently examining its practice of supporting entries with written citations which is exclusionary for certain types of knowledge. 

The idea that information can be owned by a person, and by copyrighted is actually quite a western concept, and other cultures have a more shared conception of knowledge, that it is owned by a community.

While there is recognition that there might be some issues with the exclusionary nature of referencing styles, there are barriers to change. Any new mode of referencing must be flexible, and we have to recognise the time burden in effecting meaningful change. What if all references were replaced by hyperlinks? What if everyone had an ORCID ID? But not everyone has an internet connection, not everyone has an ORCID ID. The panel found that every solution they came up with had significant practical issues.
Photo Pam mcKinney: LILAC lanyards