Please join the Italian Art Society’s Emerging Scholars Committee for the first event in our new series centered on equity and inclusion in academia! Our open forum discussion, “Citing Truth to Power: Advancing Equity In & Through Academic Footnotes,” is free and open to all! Wednesday, June 2 from 12:00-1:00pm Central Time (US Chicago time).

Footnotes are the fundamental building blocks of academic arguments. They not only validate new ideas, they also situate us scholars within larger academic conversations and serve as a roadmap for how those conversations have developed over time. But this relationship is reciprocal. When appealing to the authority of these previous scholars, our footnotes also amplify their voices and argue implicitly for what conversations are worth being had, and by whom. As a result, footnotes often serve to reinforce the dominance of a narrow range of (usually European and American, white, fully-able, male) academics, limiting both the kinds of conversations that can be had within a field as well as who can have them. Academic footnotes, then, can be shown to do the work of white supremacy.
For this reason, we invite you to our virtual open forum, Citing Truth to Power: Advancing Equity in and through Academic Footnotes, sponsored by the Emerging Scholars Committee of the Italian Art Society.  By bringing scholars of Italian Art History and related art historical and humanities fields into conversation with each other, we hope to interrogate what is at stake in both our footnotes and the citational process.  Some starting points for our conversation will be:

·      How can we open up our footnotes to include and generate more voices and more academic discourse?
·      What consideration, if any, should be given to the personal identities and misdeeds of the people we cite, as well as their non-academic views and opinions, which may or may not come into play in the construction of and biases implicit in their own academic arguments?
·      How can we be critical about the stakes of our citations and still meet editorial demands? Must those demands—and the demands of our fields—change to accommodate broader and more diverse points of view?

The forum will start with brief discussions from Dr. Allison Levy, Dr. Julia Delancey, and PhD Candidates Angela Zhang and Christine Zappella. We are also very excited to welcome a representative from the Cite Black Women Collective.

Zoom Meeting ID: 874 0164 6870
Passcode: 331649