Yes, Women Also Know History: Online Resources Identify and Highlight Women Experts
...Women Also Know Stuff has also directly inspired other groups, including Women Also Know History (WAKH) a media and curriculum tool I co-founded with Keisha N. Blain, a historian of 20thcentury United States, and a professor at the University of Pittsburgh (also Senior Editor of Black Perspectives, the blog for the African American Intellectual History Society, which I profiled for the Kitchen in 2017) and Emily Prifogle, a JD and a PhD student in history at Princeton specializing in legal history, social movements, and the history of the American Midwest. Women Also Know History began with email exchanges among the three of us, and with Christina Wolbrecht, a Professor of Political Science at Notre Dame, editorial board member of Women Also Know Stuff (and crucially, the friend of a friend) about whether an homage site in history might be feasible and how much we could learn from the site structure and experience of WAKS. The WAKS team was fully supportive, and gave us some insight into their site development and their governance. The program committee for the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians in June of 2017 gave us a late breaking session slot. The session produced a lively discussion among a very engaged group of attendees, and we launched our social media right there. After a year in development, we launched the website in June of 2018. Profiled in the Chronicle of Higher Education and elsewhere, Women Also Know History now lists over 3,300 historians.
Sourcelist was another of the projects mentioned in Leonhardt’s “I’m not quoting enough” pieces. Launched last spring by scholars associated with the Brookings Institution, Sourcelist is ultimately a hub for associated lists of women experts but has begun with a focus on Women in Technology Policy. Susan Hennessey, a Brookings Fellow in National Security Law, announced Sourcelist in a post on the Lawfare blog, where she is Executive Editor. She noted that the purpose of Sourcelist “is to facilitate more diverse representation by leveraging technology to create a user-friendly resource for people whose decisions can make a difference,” but also that the project team hoped to “take away the excuse that diverse experts couldn’t be found to comment on a story or participate on a panel.” Unlike the Women Also Know sites, Sourcelist does not have an associated social media presence.
Cite Black Women began in 2017, when Anthropology Professor Christen Smith of the University of Texas created and starting selling “Cite Black Women” t-shirts at a meeting of the National Women’s Studies Association (the proceeds are used to support the Winnie Mandela School in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil). Smith’s impetus was frustration with seeing and hearing work that should be citing women scholars, particularly the scholarship of women of color; Cite Black Women is a call to recognize and call out politics of citation, and the experiences of citation erasure that has been described and analyzed by generations of black feminists. The social media work that followed with this simple yet profound statement landed Smith and Cite Black Women on Essence magazine’s list of Trending Topics for April, 2018. Also profiled in Times Higher Education last year, the Cite Black Women Collective launched their website in late December, 2018 along with a biweekly podcast that “will feature interviews and coversations about the critical praxis of citing black women, its history, its potential, and its future.” As Smith told me, “seeing the ways this movement has been inspiring to others has been so rewarding.”