Your Work, My Work, Our Work: Acknowledgement in Academe

Content Warning: Mention of Suicide and Rape

I write this with a weary tired body. I spent yesterday thinking about the injustice of the world which prevented me from having any distance from my thoughts. Part of those thoughts was what I am going to write about in this blog so maybe getting into words and out into the world will help. Maybe. This is going to be a long post so make yourself a tea. 

I start with a story, well interconnected stories. When I was in grad school someone lifted my writing and thoughts and published it as their own. I only found out because a cohort mate saw a chapter of a book and said golly this sounds real familiar. This has happened to me a lot in various ways in the 17 years that I have been in academe, but it didn't really start there. The year after I graduated high school a friend who was in their senior year called me to tell me that someone had won a writing prize at school using one of my poems and they were very very sure that it was one of my poems because it read like one of my poems. Interestingly I had a day off from the new high school I was attending across the border in Ontario and so I went to my old high school to visit. And there on the bulletin board was a poem I had written, but it was not my name under it. Long and short is this person got it from a note that I had sent a classmate (remember those things we used to send-loose leaf folded into neat rectangles) and thought it good and figured no one would figure it out.

When I confronted the person she admitted where she got it and thought I wouldn't mind (more like I wouldn't find out) since I had graduated. I did mind, very much, because it was a deeply personal poem shared with a friend about a personal experience in an attempt to make her feel less alone in the thing she was going through. The English teacher was told; I am not sure what happened after that. But 30 years later I still remember.

These stories speak to on some level what I want to talk about here in this post, idea sharing and acknowledgement, acknowledging the source of the work and the work that someone has put into a project, a resource, a thought. I am all for sharing resources and I know that in the Educational Developer community, especially at the beginning of the pandemic, there was a lot of discussion around sharing resources, especially if they were on shared or common topics so to help work load. However, what I am seeing a lot of now is more along the lines of taking of resources without acknowledgment and that is really not the same, and that is really really just not right (I don't even have a word for this it upsets me so much) because the original work put into to creating that resource is being erased.

When I worked as an ICP-MS technician in a geo-chemical lab I had a group of coworkers from Laos who were the best at philosophical teachings in their own way. One of them used to say to me all the time (I'm paraphrasing in English so I can translate Laotian words) "don't work so hard, because then they will just make you work harder, and then take your work." He was not wrong. I remember his words everyday, much in the way that I remember my Nonno's words of wisdom to me. There were plenty things I did in that lab that became conference papers, no where was my name mentioned. 

I know there are many of you that are reading this and nodding along. I know this because what I describe here is not an isolated thing. I know this is a systemic thing that happens everywhere. I am writing about this because we need to call it out and for it to stop. Acknowledgements need to happen. The etymology of acknowledgement is from the late Middle English for "admit or show one's knowledge (from understanding)" and making a noun by adding -ment which refers to "the act" of that acknowledging. It is that act that I want to speak to in some way in this blog, and what those acts can look like in practice. 

Just like the robust conversation about land acknowledgments and Indigenous knowledge in our work, an acknowledgment should not be lip service. An acknowledgment is heart felt, it is grounded in space you find yourself in. It is one thing to say you care about (insert important thing X here) and it is a very different thing to show it. That showing is so lacking right now, and it is exhausting and upsetting. I started this blog with a content warning. I put it there because I care about modelling safe engagement with ideas, and that is one way that I can show it on a virtual asynchronous platform. I put it there because I want to say I have attended more than a dozen meetings, keynotes, conferences since this pandemic started where folk just started talking about suicide or suicidal ideation and in no way flagged that this was going to happen. Don't do this. Please don't do this. You have no idea how much you are hurting people in that space when you do this. Acknowledge that this concept may come up early at the beginning, and allow folks to be prepared for it or choose to log off from your event. 

Similarly, there is so much sharing of personal information that folk (read students, other instructors or staff) have never given permission for you to share. Don't do this. This is taking for your own benefit. There is a whole REB process (be it still in need of review) to prevent these kinds of things. And yet, I see it, time and again. Acknowledge the sources of this information and let others know you have permission to share this. Chances are you don't and that's why you haven't mentioned that acknowledgement. This is an extractive practice. And it is an extractive practice that I see happening a lot around BIPOC folk, disabled folk, 2SLGBTQ+ folk, and all the intersections there in. The work of extraction happens when there is a power differential. Maybe if I give you a visual this will help. Again warning that this image may be upsetting to some so please don't click as I give the description after. When you do this this is what it looks like to me. This is Glory in the episode Tough Love of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, taking Tara's mental energy. Maybe if you have this visual in your mind next time you do something like this or ask for something that someone has carefully worked on so that you can extract more work from disabled or BIPOC folk without acknowledging that work you won't do it. 

This takes me to my other interconnected piece here which is citation practices. As academics we are literally trained to do a literature review before we do any research. So why does this not extend outside of articles or monographs? Why are we not acknowledging the thinkers and scholars who inform us and support us? As Sara Ahmed states in Living a Feminist Life, "[c]itation is feminist memory. Citation is how we acknowledge our debt to those who came before; those who helped us find our way when the way was obscured because we deviated from the paths we were told to follow" (p.15-16). And I know that sometimes citation and acknowledgement is lacking because of what I am now calling the "poor provincial cousin." I am seeing a lot of poor provincial cousins going on right now, the likes of which I have not seen since a Jane Austen novel. I have spent my whole life being the poor provincial cousin in various contexts so I know it when I see it. I have spent a lot of time speaking to incredibly insightful and amazing students in college classrooms who are trying to overcome that feeling of "not quiteness" that society says about the tension between colleges and universities. I see it also when folk disregard the incredible work of modelling trauma informed practices that places like rape crisis centres and harm reduction spaces have done for decades. You don't want to cite or acknowledge because those folk are "not quite" where you are, not quite a faculty member at a university, not quite with the same credential you have, not quite at the right institution. And what happens instead is you start talking like you are the one who invented this new knowledge when in fact those ideas have been around for a long time and are well documented. 

We talk about academic integrity for students, why are we not talking about what this looks like for academics? Do we not want to model the practices and frameworks that we wish to see in student work? Extractive practices is not great modelling. And this takes me to the final bit of this piece which is what I will call "but look we have this report." Again Sara Ahmed talks about this in On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. And here I am talking to you Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences. In Igniting Change the EDID committee identified technological access to Congress as a recommendation. And yet this week it was announced that an AI overlay is going to be used for the virtual platform they selected (which was not accessibility compliant). This specific AI overlay has been publicly identified as not working for disabled users, and yet this is what they have chosen. This is again demonstrating extractive practices by asking for this report and then not actually doing anything about what the report actually said to do. The full report is 192 pages! This is really poor modelling. It is what happens when folk are called out on their accessibility and then try to fix it with a retrofit patch. This is what happens when you don't start with comprehensive accessibility framing as foundational to planning and design of an event. This is what happens when "nothing about us without us" (Charlton, 1998) is ignored. You are a federation grounded in research, don't tell us that you couldn't research what you were buying. It upsets me that my money, (yes my money, not my institution's money, because I do not have the bandwidth on top of everything else to try to navigate the convoluted system in place for claiming things at my institution) is helping to finance this inaccessible overlay via my conference fees. 

I need to review my conference paper that I am giving at the end of the month in light of this because now I need to acknowledge this is happening. Because you see acknowledgment is good scholarship. Acknowledgment is modelling contextual practice. I will end this way too long blog with this. On Friday I received 2 very heartfelt messages thanking me for the work I had done. One about the workshop I co-facilitated with my colleague (Dianne you are a rock star rock star) and another about the work I have been doing this past year. When I logged off for the day on Friday I cried. I cried because I am tired, but I also cried because I realized that it is so very rare to hear such heartfelt meaningful acknowledgement of my work. The last time it happened was when someone mentioned that me being actively out in the space I am in was important. I am not saying this for you to flood my inbox; I am saying this because especially now, it is so important for you to take the time to say things in an earnest way because modelling is a thing, because trust is foundational to trauma-aware pedagogy. 

I don't see a lot of modelling right now and it makes me sad. So if this long post comes of anything it is this: 

• Model contextual practices
• Show in your practice don't just tell. 
• Acknowledge the work people have done, especially if they have put so much time and work into the topic and field you are discussing. 
• Acknowledge the thinkers and the work that has been done by people who are not you. 
• Be a decent human.

Maybe this is my feminist refusal, as Erin Wunker so wonderfully speaks of it. May you all refuse to be part of a space that doesn't acknowledge the work others have done and where extractive practice is the norm. 

References

Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a Feminist Life. Duke University Press. 

Charlton, J. (1998). Nothing About Us Without Us. University of California Press.

Wunker, E. (2016). Notes from a Feminist Killjoy. Book*hug Press.