Dispossessed Citation and Mutual Aid

Citational practices have relied on a fiction of ownership, by which ideas can be said to belong to those scholars who wrote them down, then are borrowed by others who cite their writings. But this fiction is unsustainable under conditions of racialized and gendered precarity in the academic profession. Ursula K. Le Guin's novel The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, when read idiosyncratically as a campus novel, provides an allegory for contemporary conditions in academia, while inviting the possibility that scholarly citation must accommodate non-scholarly or para-academic ideas, even at the risk of its displacement.