Cross-Border Networks in Writing Studies. Derek Mueller
Studies as a Case Study
According to Clary-Lemon’s 2009 study of Canadian writing research, “disciplinarity—its representation in terms of research publication, graduate programs, professional organizations, and field expertise—was a late arrival in Canada” compared to the field’s development in the US, where professionalization accelerated in the 1980s (p. 99). Two reasons often cited for this delay are the nationalist rejection of an American model of composition by Canadian departments of English and the absence of a universal first-year writing course. As a result, the field was—and is—still struggling to emerge in Canada, as reflected in the limited number of publication venues and professional organizations, and, especially, the dearth of PhD programs to educate new scholars. Despite strengths in particular areas of research, the field in Canada has lacked a “central organization, convention, or conference that unites the interests” of writing studies scholars and had trouble achieving a common sense of identity (p. 96). Although undergraduate programs have grown slowly, without an institutional base like that provided by the American first-year writing requirement, Canadian writing studies programs have developed as “ad hoc structures, contingently funded and located,” making their faculty and programs vulnerable to shifting conditions (Phelps, 2014, p. 6). Phelps describes the dilemma facing the Canadian discipline thus: “It is difficult to compose a nationally viable identity [for writing studies] around practices of instruction that are so decentered and disparate, lacking common pedagogical philosophies, habits, formats, or students” (p. 7).
The lack of visibility of writing studies in Canada is also tied to funding and disciplinary structures, which in turn influence hiring practices, all of which inform academic identity. In Canada, most university research is funded at the federal level where it is administered by three major agencies: the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada, and the Canadian Institutes for Health Research. Although some provinces and private foundations also fund university research, such funding varies hugely by region and discipline and is far less common than federal funding. In fact, when new faculty are hired at research institutions in Canada, not only are they expected to apply for federal research grants, but their ability to secure such funding usually plays an important role in promotion and tenure decisions. However, the federal granting agency where faculty researching writing and rhetoric apply, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, does not yet have a category for writing studies, which poses a considerable impediment to researchers in the field, including graduate students. (In the US, between 2004 and 2010 scholars successfully lobbied to add categories for rhetoric and composition/writing studies to several higher education databases used by government and private agencies for multiple purposes, including grant eligibility [Phelps and Ackerman, 2010]).
In addition to funding barriers to research, hiring practices are another way that writing studies scholars are marginalized in Canada. Many writing specialists, if they are fortunate enough to secure permanent positions, are hired into the growing number of teaching-intensive appointments, where they lack the status of their colleagues in the research-stream (Vajoczki, Fenton, Menard, & Pollon, 2011) and are either discouraged or prohibited outright from applying for research grants or unable to do so because of their heavy teaching loads. Yet scholars in such teaching-focused appointments are generally more visible than the writing specialists who work in writing centres, who are increasingly hired into less secure staff (rather than faculty) appointments where they are seldom supported or given credit for research and are vulnerable to administrative whims. The vulnerability of Canadian writing scholars who work in writing instruction outside of academic areas is taken up by MacDonald, Procter, and Williams (2016) and was the focus of a session at the 2015 Conference of the Canadian Association for the Study of Discourse and Writing, one of the field’s emerging central organizations in Canada.
Clary-Lemon’s focus on themes of location and national culture in her (2009) taxonomy of Canadian writing research points to a distinctive preoccupation with geography and space/place, both literal and metaphorical, in what she calls its “scholarship of definition.” All the cultural factors cited so far have contributed to the decentralization of writing studies in Canada, in the scattered, isolated, and often transitory location of its heterogeneous sites for instruction and, even more, in its rare assemblages of writing scholars. But geography has played a principal role, both in the decentralization of writing studies and in the crucial role of cross-border relations in developing Canadian scholars and an intellectual community around writing studies. Canada’s enormous landmass and relatively small population (thirty-five million), which is concentrated along the US border (at almost nine thousand kilometers it is the longest international border in the world), means that for many Canadian scholars their closest colleagues at other universities are in the US rather than Canada. Another divisive factor is language, for although the nation is officially bilingual, Canada’s French and English populations are starkly segregated geographically, with most parts of the country either predominantly francophone (such as Quebec and parts of New Brunswick, Ontario, and Manitoba) or anglophone (like most of Western Canada) rather than the languages co-existing in the same regions. Clary-Lemon shows how these institutional and geographical factors have prompted many Anglo-Canadian scholars to do doctoral studies and to professionalize in the US rather than in Canada. This strong north-south rather than east-west orientation, which Clary-Lemon traces, has important implications for cross-border scholarly networks, as we recognized in designing our study.
“Canada’s unique geography, conflated by its largest cities’ and universities’ close proximity to the US border, contributes to a fractured professional identity both aligned and in tension with that of the United States.” (Clary-Lemon, 2009, p. 97)
In her CASDW address in 2012, Phelps (2014) analyzed the situation of the Anglo-Canadian field of discourse and writing in terms of the role played by social networks in forming and sustaining a discipline as a productive locus of intellectual activity, which she distinguished from academic identity, “an intellectual network in its public persona, as it is projected, legitimated, and treated by others as disciplinary” (p. 9). Like Clary-Lemon, she emphasized location and culture in shaping both disciplinarity and the ability to gain recognition for an emergent field within a national academy.
“A discipline is an ad hoc, opportunistic accomplishment, an assemblage rather than an intentional construction, no matter how many scholars try to define and determine it. Disciplines are open networks, self-organizing and constantly on the edge of chaos. Intellectual communities, because of the way they work through competition and argumentation, tend to be internally diverse and fractured and to move through cycles of division and merger. Networks are constantly in the process of being assembled, disassembled, and reassembled at different scales, for different purposes, and on different principles of commonality.” (Phelps, 2014, p.10)
A networked understanding of disciplinarity draws attention to how historical, geographical, institutional, and linguistic conditions can facilitate or hinder networks, informing how scholars understand and conceive of both their individual academic identity and the intellectual communities to which they belong. For example, the fact that Anglo-Canadian scholars share a common language with their US-counterparts provides an additional incentive for networks to develop along a north-south rather than an east-west axis that would connect Anglo-Canadian and French-Canadian writing instruction and studies.
Phelps (2014) uses the notions of territoire, place “in and of the academy,” and terroir, “the way all the elements of a particular environment combine to make a product like wine unique to its place,” to analyze the historical formation of Canadian writing studies (p. 14). Such an ecological understanding of place is useful in accounting for the influence of local conditions on institutional nodes for scholarship and instruction, which she did in her contextual study of the University of Winnipeg:
The way it grows in a particular place [is] a unique expression of the totality of how its local network interacts with and responds to that environment—its geography and demography, financial resources, the university’s mission, ethos, and themes, institutional structures and sites for its work, other disciplines it works with, and so on (p. 14).
But a networked framework for our project helps us examine how intellectual activity and scholarly identities can transcend the purely local territoire,