Cross-Border Networks in Writing Studies. Derek Mueller
data visualization, digital mapping, qualitative analysis of interviews, case study, and historical and textual inquiry.
After working on these research goals interactively over the next year, we came away from the Paris conference with a plan for co-authoring this book, which in many respects fulfills our original goals but has also evolved in ways we couldn’t have foreseen.
“In this symposium a team of two Canadian and two U.S. researchers will combine methodologies at different scales of description to demonstrate the vital role of transnational networks in shaping and sustaining writing studies in both Canada and the United States. These studies, challenging the common trope of Canadian writing studies developing in opposition to its U.S. counterpart, explore an array of reciprocal relationships: genealogy, partnership, adaptation of model, mentorship, mutual presence.” (Proposal for WRAB 2014)
You may wonder why we have told this story of how we got together, planned this project, and came to put our work together in this collaborative book. It’s not special in any way—most co-authors or co-editors of books in our field have had similar experiences. They seldom detail the process for readers, wonder what makes it possible, or examine how it works. It’s taken for granted, along with all the features of disciplinarity (for example, conferences) that we recognize as “professional” but seldom study to find out how they actually afford intellectual activity. In fact, making all that visible is one point of our study. In tracing this history, we see the kinds of affordances for, and examples of, the very intersection of intellectual and social relations that we set out to identify and study in this project:
co-location of scholars in the same place (graduate school, a consultancy)
mentorship, beginning with genealogical relations (senior to junior) and then evolving to mutual mentorship in the context of collegial relations and collaboration
collaborating on research, on publication, on curricular review and revision
connecting one another to other scholars in extended scholarly networks (for example, the process by which we identified Canadian scholars to survey and interview)
reading one another’s published writing
connecting through common organizations
attending (cross-border) conferences: meeting to discuss projects, hearing one another’s presentations, presenting together
referring each other to scholarly ideas and texts
using technologies like Skype, email, and Google Docs to work together and keep in contact.
In other words, this history introduces us as networked, cross-border scholars, a microcosm of what we are studying. We are Canadians and Americans, insiders and outsiders to one another’s scholarly communities and cultures, different generations, from different institutions. We brought to this project different but overlapping inspirations, histories, knowledge bases, methods, and home contexts. The book in its final form reflects the evolution of both goals and methods through the reciprocal influence of our different roles and contributions to the project. Most importantly, we have increasingly knitted them together into blended, coordinated, and complementary—“networked”—methods for understanding the development of disciplines, ideas, and scholars in terms of scholarly networks.
A Networked Methodological Approach
Our study of Canada-US writing studies interdependencies enacts what we identify as a “networked methodological approach.” We consider this approach novel because it applies network logics to the design and execution of a collaborative, mixed methods research project. This “networked methodological approach” is influenced by disparate theoretical insights from network studies. Generally, network studies provide theoretical perspectives useful for attending to fluid structures of activity and relationships that may be articulated through links and nodes or simple, granular models of complex phenomena. Counter to isolating phenomena at too narrow or bounded a scope or, on the other hand, relinquishing a tightly-delineated scope to comparably baggy and inclusive references such as community or field, our use of networks for this research circumscribes the work with principles of delineated but flexible interconnection (i.e., locating connections that operate between and among differing methodological distances) and discernible granularity at scale (i.e., forms of evidence appropriate to a suite of methodologies, operating in concert).
Our reference to networks in this approach acknowledges a well-established, extensive tradition involving considerable topical and methodological variation where interconnected, complex phenomena are concerned. Social Network Analysis (SNA) has been widely adopted in quantitative sociology for more than three decades, offering greater technical precision in both modeling and measuring relationships among links and nodes (Wasserman & Faust, 1994). By contrast and with a far greater emphasis on tracing non-obvious connections using field observation and descriptive accounts, Actor-Network Theory (ANT) has influenced numerous studies that draw upon network vocabulary as researchers seek to follow human and non-human actors, from science and technology studies (see Latour, 1996) and interdisciplinary field studies in forest ecology (see Latour, 1999) to political philosophy (see Latour, 2004) and urban infrastructure (Winner, 1986; Woolgar & Cooper, 1999). Still other research on networks has framed them as a way to explain material and organismic phase transitions, or shifts at a moment of criticality from seeming chaos to pattern or order (Strogatz, 2004; Barabási & Frangos, 2002; Buchanan, 2003). Yet more network studies research has been used to theorize tensions between a rising technocracy and educational reform (Taylor, 2003) and to examine contemporary sociocultural power relations (Castells, 2009; Benkler, 2007; Galloway & Thacker, 2007). Although this is by no means a comprehensive gloss, it sufficiently locates a rich backdrop of network-oriented adaptations for inquiry and scholarly research, pointing toward the ways in which network logic encourages a methodological range of modeling, measuring, observation, analysis, narrativizing, and theorizing.
“Network studies generally have established that phenomena observable at one scale of activity are not necessarily observable or structurally equivalent at another scale. For instance, patterns of cross-border activity in which Canadian scholars complete BAs and MAs in Canada are demonstrable only on a local, anecdotal level, unless we ask the question . . . using a large-scale survey and distant readings methods to visualize the cross-border pattern of activity. Such a large scale and distant study, however, proves insufficient for helping us grasp the micro-level influence of a brief consultation visit from a U.S. scholar to a Canadian university.” (Book prospectus)
Recently and more proximate to the domain of writing studies, Swarts’s entry in Keywords in Writing Studies (2015) differentiates network as a noun from network as a verb, noting that networks emerge as “settings in which new kinds of literate information gathering, processing, and composing practices emerge” (p. 121). It is in this sense of co-location and connection that our carrying out of related, coordinated methodologies manifests, as an interdependent, orchestrated—and thus “networked”—series of operations. That is, each methodology, highlighted chapter by chapter, is tied to and intertwined with each other’s methodology. To ground our thinking about these ties and intertwining, Gochenour’s “Nodalism” (2011) has been helpful for its articulation of networks as a structural metaphor that keys on nuanced structural attunement. This attunement is most apparent in cooperative modeling, in which part and whole function more smoothly together because of their being doubly constituted as nodes and as elements in an integrated system (para. 23–24).
The most apt synthesis of networks relevant to our methodological approach stems from Spinuzzi’s Network (2008), which through its focus on workplace studies offers a definitional orientation to networks and simultaneously recognizes their methodological promise at the intersection of activity theory and Actor-Network Theory, a “synchretism” (p. 197) of grounded description and pragmatic, problem-solution exploration. Spinuzzi argues that networks share four characteristics: they are heterogeneous, multiply linked, transformative, and black-boxed. We find these principles harmonious with our interdependencies research in the following ways:
1.Networks are heterogeneous, Spinuzzi explains, because they are “constituted through relationships