FOOTNOTES — MYRIAM D. DIATTA

“I PAID ATTENTION TO THE FOOTNOTES”: DISRUPTIVE APPROACHES AND WRITING STYLES BY US, FOR US
Writing
An intervention for disrupting the politics of the academic page
2020

Author(s): Myriam D. Diatta
Page Count: 14
Status: Email for a copy of the draft.

Abstract

Critiques of hegemonic citation, language construction, formatting, and authorship norms have a rich history and praxis through information studies, language studies, feminist theory, Black studies, decolonizing design, social design, anti-racist geographies, queer theory, and social justice. While being informed by each of these distinct fields and practices, this paper contributes to scholarship in the politics of academic writing by framing the pages of a paper or article as a designed artifact. Practice-based, multi-modal remaking of the politics of the page is possible by treating the elements and types of content in a paper as structures to reshape. I suggest engaging distinct, multiple, cross-disciplinary, intersectional critiques of academic writing requires an approach based in everyday practice that can disrupt the dominating formatting, citations, language, content, and author(ity) of academic writing—at once. This paper offers fellow scholars whose positionalities are Black, Indigenous, and/or folk of color with a conceptual practice-based framework for remaking their personal academic writing processes demonstrated through a remaking of this paper itself.

Keywords

citation, politics of citation, reflexivity, authorship