Cross-Border Networks in Writing Studies. Derek Mueller
Mueller, Andrea Williams, Louise Wetherbee Phelps, and Jennifer Clary-Lemon
It’s always a bit arbitrary to pinpoint the origin of a project or piece of writing, but our cross-border collaboration began with Jennifer Clary-Lemon’s initiative to bring Louise Wetherbee Phelps from the US to the University of Winnipeg as a Fulbright Specialist Scholar in the spring of 2011, to consult and collaborate with the Department of Rhetoric, Writing, and Communications on a vision for its future development. Winnipeg’s anomalous history in Canada as a longstanding independent writing department with an American-style first-year program and a major in rhetoric and communications made this cross-border consultation especially appropriate. Based on Louise’s work on the Visibility Project seeking recognition for rhetoric and composition as a research field in American higher education (Phelps and Ackerman, 2010), Jennifer’s proposal envisioned that the project could not only inform the department’s own strategic planning but also promote greater visibility and agency for writing studies as a discipline in the Canadian academy. Jennifer, herself a dual citizen with an American doctorate, emphasized the potential for cross-border conversations to use complementary strengths and develop the field both nationally and internationally.
“The project’s outcome will be . . . one of the only existing attempts at co-constructing knowledge about a North American (rather than simply American) concept of writing studies, drawing on the strength and history of the development of the field in the United States, and the innovation and initiative of fledgling programs in Canada.” (Clary-Lemon, Fulbright proposal)
To further these goals, part of Louise’s commission was to research various contexts for understanding the department’s history, character, and potential future: a local perspective, situating it in the university, the city of Winnipeg, and the region; a comparative perspective, placing its curriculum in the landscape of Canadian instructional programs in writing and rhetoric and, contrastively, undergraduate and graduate programs in the US; and a field perspective, examining the department in the context of discourse and writing studies as a still-emerging scholarly field in the Canadian academy, interlinked with US rhetoric and composition and contributing to international writing studies. To fulfill this charge, Louise read widely in Canadian scholarship on writing and rhetoric, including publications by faculty at Winnipeg; studied websites and writings on Canadian programs; and interviewed several Canadian scholars at other institutions by phone and Skype. She was particularly informed by Jennifer’s own inventory of Canadian scholarship (Clary-Lemon, 2009), the first to survey Canadian research and publication in writing studies as distinct from instructional programs. This article examined how the Canadian field is historically rooted in the themes of location and national culture, expressing a tension between Canadian independence and dependence on the US field, with more recent research such as the new genre theory exemplifying a more hybridized North American scholarship rather than one defined in opposition to “rhetoric and composition” in the US.
“Canadian scholarship has shown itself as loyal to its historical themes of location and national culture . . . ; yet at the same time, there are, and must be, hybrid systems that blend the best research and practice of North America, as dual citizens and Canadians with American rhet/comp PhD specializations enter the picture.” (Clary-Lemon, 2009, p. 105)
After Louise completed her report (Phelps, 2011), it was taken up by the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Communications as a starting point for curricular revision at Winnipeg (discussed in chapter 4). The following spring Jennifer, Louise, and other Winnipeg faculty (Judith Kearns, Jaqueline McLeod Rogers, and Tracy Whalen) presented a roundtable at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (“4Cs”) on the Fulbright collaboration (March, 2012). Their session, “Cross-Border Collaboration in Charting a Department’s Future: Toward a North-American Conception of Rhetoric and Writing Studies,” placed the project’s cross-border conversations in the context of an “evolving, convergent, (inter)disciplinarity in North American rhetoric and writing studies,” which in turn was being integrated into an increasingly interdisciplinary and internationalized field of writing studies (4Cs roundtable proposal, 2011).
Shortly before meeting at 4Cs that year, Louise and Jennifer exchanged emails about building on this work to develop a proposal for the 2014 Writing Research across Borders (WRAB) international conference in Paris. Louise also contacted American scholar Derek Mueller about joining the group, suggesting that they could use his methodological skills to study Canadian scholarly networks. She was inspired by a 4Cs presentation on the Writing Studies Tree, a visual, crowd-sourced map of the genealogy of American scholars that was being built by some City University of New York (CUNY) graduate students. Wondering how the Tree might be extended or emulated to map Canadian scholars, Louise thought immediately of Derek, a former student at Syracuse University who had been pursuing his interests in “distant” methods, mapping, and visualization of data since graduate school. Derek and Louise contacted the CUNY team about working together on this project, but despite strong interest from graduate student Ben Miller and the faculty leader of the project, Sondra Perl, plans for combining forces and developing correlated proposals for WRAB in Paris didn’t work out. Instead Derek went forward with his own mapping project, using survey data (see chapter 2). However, as we worked toward our own plans and methods for exploring scholarly networks, we remained inspired by the CUNY team’s pioneering project to look at scholarly networks, in part, through the lenses foregrounded in the Tree: person-to-person relations (genealogical/mentoring; collegial/co-location); and person-to-institution relations (educational; workplace).
Meanwhile, at the invitation of Canadian scholar Doug Brent, Louise was preparing a keynote talk for the Canadian Association for the Study of Discourse and Writing (CASDW) conference in May, 2012 in Waterloo, Ontario. At his request, she drew together lessons from her Winnipeg studies to compare the struggles for disciplinary recognition in the United States for rhetoric and composition to those in Canada for discourse and writing. Responding to Canadian writing scholars’ ambivalence about their “pushme-pullyou conflict with American sites and conceptions of rhetoric and writing” (Clary-Lemon, 2009, p. 97), Louise suggested deconstructing and reconstructing this historical binary between dependence and independence so that “the Canadian discipline need not think of itself any more as defined either by imitation or opposition” to US writing studies (Phelps, 2014, p. 17). This movement toward a conception of Canadian-US interdependence, foreshadowed by Jennifer in her article and the Fulbright proposal, echoed in the Winnipeg roundtable at 4CS, and taken up by Louise in this address, shaped our ongoing planning for the research project we would propose for the WRAB conference in Paris.
“We sort of zeroed in on the idea of focusing on the interdependence of American (US) and Canadian writing studies—mutual influence, partnerships, cross-fertilization through graduate education—within a framework of difference. It seemed that we are playing with a set of polarities: independence/interdependence, disciplinarity vs. academic identity, disciplinarity vs. diffuse interdisciplinarity, plus methodologies at different scales.” (Email from Louise to Derek and Jennifer on planning the proposal)
Louise’s reading for her CASDW talk included Randall Collins’s The Sociology of Philosophies (2000), which offers a global theory of how intellectual networks operate to develop, debate, and circulate ideas, emphasizing the synchrony of thought and social relationships. His essential insight, that intellectual activity is a flow of ideas among people energized and informed by their engagement with one another, reinforced the interest we shared in exploring scholarly networks, especially genealogical ones, as a way of understanding how disciplines form, develop, and sustain themselves.
These experiences, meetings, readings, and interchanges all fed into our proposal for the 2014 WRAB conference in Paris as we began putting it together in February, 2013, now including Andrea Williams, a Canadian scholar and writing program administrator who had met Louise at the CASDW conference. Andrea would add an interview-based qualitative study to what we were now thinking of as a multi-methodological study of “interdependencies and cross-pollination between Canadian and U.S. writing studies” (proposal for WRAB 2014). Our methods would use different scales of description, ranging from “distant to close,” to describe the role of transnational networks in shaping and sustaining writing studies in both countries. Collectively, we would gather data through surveys and interviews of Canadian