America’s Boston University has just introduced a “Citation Justice Pledge”, encouraging students and staff to “commit to intentionally uplifting and centering” the work of “authors who are Black, Indigenous, persons of color, of varied abilities [aren’t we all?], and part of the 2SLGBTQIA+ community”. Those who sign the pledge are invited to attend workshops on diversifying reference sources. They also receive branded tote bags and stickers.
Although presented as voluntary, the pledge has renewed concerns about a shift in higher education towards a form of soft (or not so soft) compulsion. What begins as an effort to do the right thing — in this case, broadening academic reference points — can easily become a de facto political litmus test, displacing genuine scholarship in favour of identity politics.
The concept of “citational justice” originated in the US when academics working in critical race theory and social justice traditions argued that the question of who gets quoted in scholarly work reflects and reproduces structural inequalities in academia. Citations, they noted, aren’t just acknowledgements of intellectual debt — they also influence who is read, who receives funding and who is recognised as authoritative.
In 2017, Christen A. Smith, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Texas, launched the “Cite Black Women” campaign in response to what she described as the repeated erasure of black women’s scholarship. That same year, in a book called Living a Feminist Life, the social theorist Sara Ahmed pledged to cite only women so as to counter the “male-dominated canon”.
These ideas soon gained traction and by the early 2020s, citational justice had become a recognised framework in several disciplines, particularly in the humanities and social sciences. In 2022, the Conference on College Composition and Communication — a national professional association of US college and university writing instructors – took up the cause too, declaring in a formal position statement that “citation… is political, and can be a tool both for maintaining white supremacy and for advancing racial justice”.
Meanwhile, a similar process is also under way in the UK, where efforts to “decolonise the syllabus”, initially aimed at widening the range of voices taught, increasingly regard citation as an ethical matter.
At the University of Kent, for example, a 2022 review of reading lists found they “overwhelmingly comprised items by White male authors”. In response, the university launched a “Diversity Mark” process — complete with a Diversity Mark Toolkit — to help departments revise their materials. Those taking part in the process described this as an effort to “diversify our footnotes”: a phrase that neatly captures the crossover between syllabus design and citation politics.
And then there’s the Race Equality Charter (REC) launched by the charity Advance HE (“We help higher education organisations be the best they can be”). This national scheme, which many universities have joined, asks institutions applying for an REC award to explain “how you consider race equality within course content”, including “research and researchers cited”.
One university to have embraced this principle with particular keenness is Birmingham. In 2023, its Business School’s Decolonisation Project focused explicitly on citation practices, urging staff to reflect on the demographic makeup of their reference sources, and on “how many of these authors are men and/or white”. Staff were also encouraged to include “citation diversity statements” in their publications, with one of the recommended statements reading like the sort of thing people in China had to sign after a Maoist struggle session:
Recent work in several fields of science has identified a bias in citation practices such that papers from women and other minority scholars are undercited relative to the number of papers in the field. We recognize this bias and have worked diligently to ensure that we are referencing appropriate papers with fair gender and racial author inclusion.
Citational justice is already being treated not as a topic to be interrogated or debated, but as a settled truth to be implemented
At King’s College London, a recent — and by no means untypical — advert for a lectureship in music required applicants to submit a separate document outlining their experience of “supporting… equality, diversity and inclusion [EDI] in the higher education context”: an obvious sign of the expectation that academics must align themselves with a particular set of values. And while there may be no formal checkbox for citational justice on academic job forms just yet, it’s certainly becoming part of the EDI commitments that many UK institutions look for in successful applicants. Indeed, as one British vice-chancellor has acknowledged, “Addressing citation justice is central to these commitments.”
Moreover, as with other EDI concepts, such as critical race theory and unconscious bias, citational justice is already being treated not as a topic to be interrogated or debated, but as a settled truth to be implemented.
The risks of this approach are not hard to see. For one thing, academics who want to advance their careers (i.e. most of them) will understandably feel pressure to toe the line on the issue, even at the expense of scholarly rigour. For another, if readers come to believe citations are selected primarily for political reasons, it could undermine the credibility of the very people citation justice aims to support, casting doubt on whether non-white and female sources are being quoted on merit or as a smart career move.
To put it more simply, whatever happened to academic freedom?
