Artistic Research as Citational Practice

Abstract

Artistic research has helped verify how primary a role creative processes play in not only constructing knowledge but also questioning knowledge elitism. The particular power-knowledge problematics for artistic research – addressed in both academic and artistic ways in this paper – is academic quotation. I first trace critical qualitative inquiry into citation back to feminist ethnography’s so-called citational politics. Then, by methodologizing my own artistic research into the non-distinction between reading and citing academic language, I make it possible for citationality to be holistically understood as interplay between: citation’s technical role in academic writing; its quantitative role in academic capitalism; and its political role in academic positionality. The well-trodden citational genealogies called out by Sara Ahmed are replaced by citational pathways connecting the authoring academic to voices entirely outside the discourse community that is academia in, for example, the arts-based educational research of Camea Davis. In the final analysis, such artistic understandings of citationality – citations that transform what we mean by citation – have the power to redeploy citations as channels of communication for social change.