Reading internationally: if citing is a political practice, who are we reading and who are we citing?

Abstract

Across multiple disciplines from communication science and political science to astronomy, research has pointed to gender citation bias, racialised citation bias and the regional tilt of many international journals towards authors based in a small set of countries, including the USA, UK and Australia (e.g., Caplar et al., 2017;Dion et al. 2018;Trepte and Loths 2020). These citation patterns not only have an effect on the quality of research publications and the breadth of perspectives and insights circulating as contributions to knowledge, but also on the futures of individual scholars working in systems in which citation scores matter for careers. Citing is political. We recognize these biases in articles in Learning, Media and Technology, and encourage contributors to consider whether their manuscripts reflect the diversity of researchers in the field, and thus of research perspectives, and/or if their research and writing would benefit from incorporating a broader range of research.One issue we would like to focus on in this editorial is the linguistic diversity of published research. Given today's online translation machines, it is becoming easier to scan international research, looking for work that takes a critical, questioning approach to learning, media and technology. For this editorial, we reflected on empirical and theoretical work that is grounded in social, cultural, political or media theory. Who are we reading? Who could we be reading? Where can scholars writing for Learning, Media and Technology be looking if they want to read and cite beyond the core set of English-language journals that we often see cited in these pages?With this editorial, we set out to broaden the range of scholars who inspire us. We travelled west from our three locations in Europe to explore the research landscape in Latin America, taking in Spanish and Portuguese publications along the route. With absolutely no claim that we have covered the depth and range of exciting research in this region, we here simply point to some highlights that we discovered, thanks to human and machine networks that helped us explore recent research. 1 Platformisation, datafication, surveillanceRecent research on platforms in schools or higher education in Latin America, Portugal and Spain has pointed to the expansion of market logics in education (CGI 2022). A key concern is that since the 'cybernetic turn' (Santos 2003), educational institutions have been destabilised. New powerful market actors have been reshaping education in ways from which they profit, and thus also reshaping social relations (CGI 2022: 6f.). The integration of digital technologies into education has further strengthened the hegemony of market discourses (Magalhães 2021) and configured a quantified, bibliometricised, neoliberal