“Intellectual Bondage: Toward a Politics and Hybridity of Academic Writing” by Tyler Thier
In “ The Politics of Citation ,” Annabel Kim envisions this titular convention as “the map of a process, not the map of a territory.” She barrels onward, arguing for citation not as a site of accruing intellectual capital where the rich get richer and the stars get brighter while the precariat writing against erasure gets forgotten and poorer, but as a jubilee that levels the fields in which we write so that we might accrue an extravagant set of debts resulting not in intellectual bondage but in intellectual freedom. I’m a writing scholar, so I know quite well that writing is situational, dependent on rhetorical purpose, audience, kairos, and so on, that it flexes across genres and adapts itself to various ethical schema. But just because this is an observed truth in my discipline doesn’t mean it should be fundamentalized. The goal of writing studies and composition is to acclimate students to the idea that writing is an essential object unto itself, that it is worthy of study in it