On Thinking Alongside

Last weekend I had the pleasure of reading Rehearsals for Living by Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and I have been thinking about so many concepts and feelings that they both share in their epistolary exchange. One of the concepts that has really deeply stuck with me and was reinforced by listening to a few podcasts that Maynard and Betasamosake Simpson have been on in the last week discussing their book, is the concept of thinking alongside. They both speak to how this epistolary exchange is a praxis of thinking alongside the other's thoughts and words in previous publications. In thinking alongside they seem to express a deep need and sense of gratitude and acknowledgement of the importance of past and future thought created alone and together.

It is a powerful concept that helped me explain something that has been holding sad space in my soul and mind for a long time which happens a lot in academe and we see so many Twitter threads about, which the lack of citational acknowledgement or actual theft of other people's thoughts. Instructors and units at institutions spend so much time talking about, training about, and let's be honest surveilling in different ways how academic integrity works in undergraduate spaces that often that same amount of attention is not placed in ensuring that the instructors themselves are modelling academic integrity practices in their own research and pedagogy. We have had many discussions on how lack of modelling in different ways within academic spaces is problematic. Well this is a big one that has impacted me and those I care about directly from grad school onward.

Academic integrity at its core is an equity issue. It is putting practices and philosophies in place that acknowledge the work of the folk who have come before us and how that work has informed who we are as people within educational spaces and who we are as ethical humans. And this is why this thought theft and lack of equitable citational practices are deeply indicative of the work that needs to be done in academe as a whole about power dynamics and representation. It is what makes a lot of unmeaningful EDI/DEI work so problematic as well. When work is done that connects to any sort of EDI/DEI framing and the person who is doing that work, writing about that work, training folk to support that work, does not cite or acknowledge the origins of thought that inform that work, that is just further inequitable co-opting. It is taking the origins of justice organizing around disability rights, abolition of racist policies, Indigenous land back, support of unhoused folk, community harm reduction work and support, and making it your own when it is not yours. 

We have seen a lot of this since last week when folk decided that now that a change impacts them, they now care about advocacy and community engagement work, but they sadly left out the community part. In particular, they left out the acknowledgement or even the awareness that there are communities of folk who have be organizing around these issues for literally decades. It is a radical history, both in the bell hooks/Kevin Gannon radical as etymologically foundational way and in the socio-political connotative way, that does not belong to you, and you have taken for your own without acknowledgement. When I see that kind of thing happening it hurts, deeply. It hurts because it erases the actual violence folk have experienced, it erases the work that so many have done before these thoughts percolate in academe. 

Imagine the students who see this happening and know that this is their history, but no where is that history being acknowledged in the work in their courses that continually and actively refuse to cite the thinkers who are part of their history. This no longer becomes thinking alongside work, this becomes erasure work. Thinking alongside requires grace, requires listening, requires gratitude. And as I think through this concept I dare say that thinking alongside requires an asking for permission or even an invitation. I have been so lucky over the years that folk in community have asked me to think alongside them, to share word space, to share empathy space, to support community care. I love this kind of modelling of practice, and acknowledgement that yes I would love to collaborate with you, think with you. I think it is a fabulous thing to share with students and learners as well. Be open to thinking alongside someone, but acknowledge the history of thought that is there in that person's community as well. Be clear about the history and write it in in some way because whether you acknowledge it formally or not, the history is etched in those words and it is a necessary ethical and empathic move to acknowledge that formally rather than pretend you were the originator of those ideas. 

Maybe this is a way to explain academic integrity to students. Maybe this is a better way to frame why using power to steal ideas is really just continuing racist, hetero-patriarchal, capitalist, extractive frameworks. I hope that some of these ideas make sense to you or you can connect to them in some way in your research, your pedagogy, and your thinking life. Let's be caring in the way we think alongside others, because folks' ideas deserve the acknowledgment of the history of organizing against oppression that informed them in the first place.