Tracing intellectual histories on campus walls? A visual essay on citation pedagogy from within the Indian university

This Points of Departure invites readers to engage with the critical possibilities of ways of seeing quotidian citation practices in higher education spaces, to make legible the complexities and ambiguities of the politics of expression, representation and voice that students negotiate. It builds on arguments about the value of approaching citation as an object of inquiry, rather than a matter of training such as for citation literacy or policing plagiarism. Logocentric scholarly interest in citation practices, relations and infrastructures of formal curricula, is extended in this nonlinear visual essay to the visuality of material displayed in campus spaces. By thinking through a postcritical discourse analysis of a curated series of contemporary photographs composed from within Indian university campuses, questions for critical citation pedagogy are raised in relation to in/hyper/visible gendered and intersectional struggles for educational and intellectual authority in that democracy.