Wilful Citations
Felt Notes
This month’s letter titled “Wilful Citations” is written by Kim Munro as a response to and in continuation from my previous writing on “#CitePedagogy.” During their recent campus visit and stay in Bengaluru, it was wonderful to learn about Kim’s work as a documentary maker, educator, and researcher, as well as share aspects of my own research and teaching in critical digital humanities at the Just Futures Co-lab. Thank you so much for your generous sharing of ideas, Kim, and for this reflective dialogue on citational politics.
When my friend Sav sent me a piece of calico — 60 cm x 25 cm — to create a piece of artwork for an exhibition in her new backyard gallery, I was confronted by the challenge of what to make. As a filmmaker, I work with technologies and screens and cameras. What would I do with a piece of cloth? With the exhibition theme of “opening,” [1] my first thought was to try my hand at embroidery and stitch a list of sentences from the openings of key works that have inspired my thinking, as well as ones that I have yet to read, which are many. I started working on line from feminist science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin [2] and anthropologist Anna Tsing [3]. It was around this time that the February 2024 Felt Notes titled “#CitePedagogy” arrived in my inbox. What resonated with me was the idea of “think[ing] citationally” that Kush emphasized and described in this letter, or citing as a way of “being in community” through the practice of listening and amplifying the voices of others – whether scholars, peers, community members or our wider others. Reading this letter prompted me to reflect on the politics of my own citational practices, and how I might make it more visible in my own scholarly work, teaching, and creative practice. I decided not to continue embroidering unattributed sentences from texts, but to rather make a list of footnotes which reflect either current textual interests, or ones that I want to read. In reference to Sara Ahmed’s Willful Subjects [3], I called this piece “Wilful Citations.” In her exploration of “will,” Ahmed interrogates how the notion of “wilfulness” has been used through literature and philosophy. One reading is that to be wilful is a “failure to comply with those whose authority is given.” [4]
Working in screen media and documentary, I am aware how often disciplines are reproduced by what Sara Ahmed calls “techniques of selection” or “ways of making certain bodies and thematics core to the discipline” [5]. Sometimes these selections are less a matter of deliberate choice than of defaulting to what is already known. To counter this convention, we need more “wilful” consideration, and labour, to bring in new and different voices — without necessarily always referring to those foundational disciplinary texts often written by the usual suspects. Taking the time to find less canonical scholarly and creative work can feel like an act of resistance — especially in the neoliberal university when so much emphasis is placed on producing, or outputting academic publications, rather the slow and deep labour of reading and thinking.
Beginning with Sara Ahmed’s The Feminist Killjoy Handbook [6] and arriving at Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s “R-Words: Refusing Research” [7], I embroidered footnotes from a selection of current theoretical concerns — from feminism, through affect and queer theories to decolonisation. With page numbers included, each of these references presents an invitation to the reader to seek them out and bring these texts and ideas into conversation or “community.” Stitching the footnotes with singular focus became the embodied labour which then forms an entanglement with this writing as part of the creative-practice methodology.
What does it mean then to foreground voices that are either less canonical, or disciplinary aligned? While Tuck and Yang write from the disciplinary perspective of decolonisation in the social sciences and emphasize through and through that “decolonization is not a metaphor,” [8] I find resonance with practices of documentary. For example, when they discuss the “pain and humiliation in the lives of those being researched for commodification,” [9] we can compare this critique to what Brian Winston calls the “tradition of the victim” in documentary [10]. Choosing to cite Tuck and Yang here can bring the perspective of what Trinh T Minh-ha calls speaking nearby rather about [11]. Thinking citationally becomes acting citationally.
“Remember, the first rule of Cite Club is that YOU DO talk about Cite Club.” [12]
Citations matter. For the Australian-based Feminist Educators Against Sexism #FEAS, Cite Club is an intervention into sexism in educational and academic spaces through making citation practices more visible.
I am thankful to Kush for inviting my thoughts on citation politics and for inspiring my new embroidery practice. I have started my second project on Palestinian writers which also invites further engagement in literature, creative works, and scholarship from this region – which feels particularly urgent at the moment.
— Kim Munro
Notes
[1] Retractable_art_space: https://www.instagram.com/retractable_art_space/?img_index=1
[2] Ursula Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (London: Ingot Books, 2019).
[3] Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).
[4] Sara Ahmed, Willful Subjects (Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2014), 1.
[5] —, “Making Feminist Points,” feministkilljoys Blog (September 11, 2013), para 4. https://feministkilljoys.com/2013/09/11/making-feminist-points/.
[6] —, The Feminist Killjoy Handbook: The Radical Potential of Getting in the Way (New York: Seal, 2023).
[7] Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang. “R-Words: Refusing Research” in D. Paris and M. T. Winn (Eds.) Humanizing Research: Decolonizing Qualitative Inquiry with Youth and Communities (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2014): 223-247.
[8] —, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40.
[9] —, “R-Words: Refusing Research,” 223.
[10] Brain Winston, “The Tradition of the Victim in Griersonian Documentary,” in Image Ethics: The Moral Rights of Subjects in Photographs, Film, and Television, edited by Larry Gross, John Stuart Katz and Jay Ruby (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988): 34–57.
[11] Nancy N. Chen, “Speaking Nearby: A conversation with Trinh T. Minh-ha,” Visual Anthropology Review 8 (1) (1992).
[12] Feminist Educators Against Sexism, “The first rule about #FEAS cite club…”, https://feministeducatorsagainstsexism.com/cite-club/
Biography
Kim Munro is a documentary researcher and practitioner who works across film, installation and audio. Kim’s work has been screened on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation as well as at local and international galleries and festivals. Her current research examines place, history and archives and includes The Art of Work is a Work of Art about the iconic feminist performance space, Vitalstatistix. Kim is also the co-editor of Constructions of the Real: Intersections of Documentary-Based Film Practice and Theory (2023), and the special issue of Unlikely: Journal for Creative Arts, ‘Resistance’ (2024). Kim lives and works on unceded Kaurna land (Adelaide) and is a lecturer at the University of South Australia.
Opportunities
+ SAH CONNECTS: Surveillance, Cartography, Aerial Imaging and the Conquest of Palestine with Zeynep Çelik, Salim Tamari, and Patricia Morton (April 24, 2024). Register here (Zoom).
+ Jobs: A Digital Accessibility Job Board (for folx working on assistive technologies) (Global, Ongoing).
+ Call for Submissions: Little Puss Press (original manuscripts of fiction and non-fiction, including works-in-progress. The Press is also considering reprint proposals of literary/historical works of significance by transgender authors (Deadline: Ongoing)
+ Call for Participation: Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) 2024 at the University of Victoria, Victoria (Registration Deadline: June 1, 2024)
+ Call for Proposals: SEA Pavilion Designs Responding to the Monsoon and Climate Change, School of Environment and Architecture (SEA, Mumbai), in conversation with Raqs Media Collective, Delhi and Invisible Dust U.K. and in partnership with the Design Village with the support of the Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Mumbai (Deadline: April 30, 2024)
About
Felt Notes are monthly dispatches about the work of the Just Futures Co-lab, and the co-labouring worlds of research and teaching in art, design, and the digital humanities that it scaffolds, furthers, and amplifies. The letter writing translates the ever so negotiated nature of this space at Srishti Manipal Institute and the discourse and scholarship on equity and justice I produce with students and wider academic and non-academic community members through critical pedagogy; archives and databases; interactive digital storytelling; and inquiries into queer-feminist media technologies and infrastructures.
I hope reading this letter and its upcoming segments are a meaningful experience for you. If you aren’t subscribed yet, you may do so here. If you are already subscribed, I would love for you to share the link with friends and trusted networks as we make sense of our relationships to technology as well as our relationships to each other via technology. If you would like to write or co-write a letter in the future or share any announcements, please feel free to get in touch with me, and whilst you’re here, please also check out the Felt Notes Archive.
Kush Patel