[Air-L] Please Cite Women Academics

Fri Feb 26 23:53:39 PST 2016

My three cents here.

Its not enough to "add and stir" women's work or "gender" focused work.

It is important to understand that women, international scholars of various
caste/class/race/ethnicity backgrounds are doing VERY good work and
engaging issues from various contexts and standpoints that are integral to
the practice of global knowledge building.

If someone has a Phd advisor, course instructor or mentor who does not
understand this and merely encourages budding researchers to pick up
"gender" from women, POC issues from people of color, "international"
topics from international seeming named scholars - and they do not see how
embedded we ALL are and how the scholarly debates and discussions  (white
males included:)) to their research/writing - the person who does NOT cite
diverse scholars is the loser.

Because - they are not doing what it takes to do the in-depth literature
review to begin with.

The argument of "i don't cite feminists because I'm not doing gender" or "I
don't cite race related work because I'm not focusing on race or don't
believe it exists in my context I'm examining" doesn't hold...

These scholarly viewpoints and investigations existing - and have been put
through very strong peer review processes - just as much as the standard
names that are considered to be "academic capital"

My  view - if you're not looking for and citing women or any one else not
straight under your nose - your work suffer.

Also remember - a lot of women and people of color do a ton of service - we
are on hiring committees, we do a lot of journal and book (peer) reviews  -
we make ourselves available even when there is no clear monetary or other
value attached to the work.

:)

thanks for listening.

r

Radhika Gajjala
*Co-editor of ADA: Journal of Gender and New Media*
*http://adanewmedia.org <http://adanewmedia.org>*

*Fulbright Professor/Research Scholar in Digital Culture at University of
Bergen, August 1, 2015-July 31, 2016*
*__*

Professor
School of Media and Communication
and
American Culture Studies Program
Bowling Green State University,
Bowling Green Ohio
http://www.radhikagajjala.org <http://www.cyberdiva.org/>

__

Radhika
Gajjala
Fulbright Professor (2015-2016)
Department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies
<http://www.uib.no/en/lle>
Visit Address:
HF-bygget, Sydnesplassen 7
5020 Bergen
Postal Address:
Postboks 7805
5020 Bergen
Phone:
+47 55 58 97 63
E-mail:
Radhika.Gajjala at uib.no
____

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 6:45 AM, Peter Timusk <peterotimusk at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hello all
>
> I sent this off list to Gabriella Coleman in reply to her gender thread
> e-mail and now see it may add a different view to this thread. I am middle
> aged but 'fresh enough out of  a BA program' but not a teacher. I work
> supporting government social science researchers or 'policy wonks' I think
> you call them.
>
> Here is that reply.
>
> Hello
>
> I don't mean to mansplane just that I read on gender in my legal studies
> BA at Carleton and focused on the Internet and computer crime topics as I
> learned law. I would just add that in sci and tech sociology there is a
> gender thread that can be found. There are studies of how boy and girls use
> technology differently. You can go back to the scholars in the 1970's and
> see analysis of gender in the high tech workplace too.
>
> I note that in doing my undergraduate BA at Carleton University in Ottawa
> we were told we had to pay attention to gender and promote women in our
> writing and that any sexist writing was grounds for expulsion. The McGill
> law student's legal studies citation guide was used to allow us to
> reference first names as an indicator of gender.
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Air-L [mailto:air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of sky c
> Sent: Friday, February 26, 2016 10:08 PM
> To: Jill Walker Rettberg
> Cc: air-l at listserv.aoir.org
> Subject: Re: [Air-L] Please Cite Women Academics
>
> I've also slowly been trying to correct the bad habits I developed during
> my undergraduate and PhD studies, where most of the sources we were given
> were white men.
>
> One thing I've noticed is that in many fields, the mainstream perspectives
> are dominated by white men, and while digging deeper helps a bit, it
> doesn't fully remedy the problem. Consciously trying to think about what
> different perspectives might look like, and the key words associated with
> that, sometimes helps: for example, if I'm mostly getting the same
> demographic turn up in my searches, I'll try adding, "feminist" or
> "postcolonial" or "decolonize" to my search. That, and similar approaches,
> helps me turn up not just a different demographic of writers, but also
> often very different perspectives.
>
>
>
>
> On Fri, 2016-02-26 at 09:42 +0000, Jill Walker Rettberg wrote:
>
> > Janet Sternberg’s point that people don’t search carefully and therefore
> miss key references means we need to think about how to make our research
> searchable - we need to use the most likely search terms in titles and
> abstracts of our publications.
> >
> > The first time I was recommended to do this was in 2014, and the
> publisher said that deliberate use of likely search terms makes a huge
> difference in how many people actually find books and book chapters. This
> is a rather different way of thinking about how to title academic work than
> we are used to, but one we should definitely be aware of. Of course, we
> should also teach our students to search better, using related terms and
> seeing what is referenced by other scholars on the topic.
> >
> > Also: we should all deliberately make sure to cite women and people of
> colour in all our work. For the last few years, I have carefully looked at
> my references as I write, and if there isn’t a pretty even gender balance,
> I search harder to find women writing about the topic. I use Google Scholar
> most, but I also ask other women in related areas if they know of other
> women I should be aware of. I have ALWAYS found more women when I
> specifically search, and they are usually doing fabulous stuff that has
> been really helpful to my own work. And often they do not pop up when you
> first start to explore an area. Not digging deeper means missing out on
> really valuable work.
> >
> > Jill
> >
> > Jill Walker Rettberg
> > Professor of Digital Culture
> > Dept of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies University of
> > Bergen
> >
> > Blog - http://jilltxt.net
> > Twitter - http://twitter.com/jilltxt
> > My book "Seeing Ourselves Through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs
> and Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves" is out on Palgrave as an
> open access publication - buy it in print or download it for free!
> > http://jilltxt.net/books
> >
> > > On 26 Feb 2016, at 0:00 , Janet Sternberg wrote:
> > >
> > > Limited research skills/efforts are often as much to blame as gender
> > > bias in failure to cite relevant work. For example, academics and
> > > journalists (including women) writing about online harassment rarely
> > > cite my 2001 dissertation and 2012 book, "Misbehavior in Cyber Places:
> > > The Regulation of Online Conduct in Virtual Communities on the
> > > Internet." Researchers who only search for "trolling" or "troll"
> > > will likely miss my work on misbehavior because they don't search
> > > broader terms like "online conduct.”
> > > Just a few decades ago, researchers were encouraged to look for a
> > > variety of synonymous terms in order to uncover relevant related
> > > work, but nowadays folks tend to search rather specific terms, and
> > > if they don't find exact matches, they seem to assume no other
> > > relevant research exists. Of course, gender bias continues to be a
> > > problem, but it's not the only reason relevant academic work gets
> neglected.
> > >
> > > Janet Sternberg, PhD
> > > http://about.me/JanetPhD
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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>
>
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