Citation Guide
Every submission to the Movement Journal requires three levels of citation. This framework ensures that movement knowledge is properly attributed, contextualized, and situated within scholarly and cultural traditions.
Scholarly Citation
The scholarly citation situates your movement within the existing academic literature. It connects your contribution to the published conversation about your tradition, your movement form, or your methodological approach. This citation follows standard academic formatting and demonstrates that you have engaged with prior research.
Welsh, Kariamu. “African Dance: The Continuity of Change.” Journal of Black Studies 15, no. 2 (1984): 148–163. The present movement sequence responds to Welsh's analysis of polyrhythmic articulation in West African ceremonial dance, extending her framework to documented motion capture data.
Movement Citation
The movement citation acknowledges prior recordings in the Movement Journal corpus that your submission relates to, responds to, or builds upon. It creates an interconnected network of movement knowledge where new contributions are explicitly linked to existing ones. If your submission is the first of its kind in the corpus, you may note this instead.
This sequence is performed in dialogue with Emoghene, Sinclair. “Bata — Yoruba Sacred Drumming Dance.” Movement Journal, 2024. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.gmr.bata001. The present recording documents the female response pattern that typically accompanies the male lead documented in that entry.
Cultural Citation
The cultural citation credits the tradition-bearers, teachers, and communities from which your movement derives. This is not a formality. It is the journal's most important field. Movement knowledge lives in bodies and communities before it lives in archives. The cultural citation ensures that this lineage is documented and honored.
This movement was learned from Alhaji Mukaila Sanni, master Bata drummer of Oyo State, Nigeria, who carries the lineage of the Alaafin palace drummers. The sequence honors the connection between Bata rhythms and bodily articulation in Yoruba devotional practice as transmitted through his teaching over three years of study in Ibadan.
Why This Matters
Traditional academic citation practices were designed for text. They assume that knowledge flows from published author to published author, through books and journal articles that can be referenced by title, page, and year.
Movement knowledge does not work this way. It flows from body to body, through teachers and communities who may never publish anything. The cultural citation brings this lineage into the scholarly record. It creates a permanent acknowledgment that the movement being documented exists because specific people carried it, taught it, and entrusted it to the submitting researcher.
The Movement Journal is building a citation infrastructure that the field has needed for decades. Your citations are part of that infrastructure.