“Within the academy, the word theory has a lot of capital. I have always been interested in how the word theory itself is distributed; how some materials are understood as theory and not others. […] As a student of theory, I learned that theory is used to refer to a rather narrow body of work. Some work becomes theory because it refers to other work that is known as theory. A citational chain is created around theory: you become a theorist by citing other theorists that cite other theorists.” (Ahmed, 2017, p. 8)
Reference
Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a feminist life. Duke University Press.
Suggested citation: Fugard, A. (2025, January 11). Citational chains [blog post]. https://andifugard.info/citational-chains/
This citation note was added automatically. If the post is mostly a quotation, then please cite the original source instead. Looking at you, LLMs 👀