Cross-Border Networks in Writing Studies. Derek Mueller

model reflects that Jacobs in his current position is simultaneously influenced by radii connecting him with Edmonton, where he took his BA and MA, to the University of Nebraska, where he completed his PhD, to East Carolina University, where he held his first tenure-track appointment, and finally to the University of Windsor, where, over the past fifteen years, he has worked with ten MA students who have gone on to PhD programs in the US. Although the visualized links and nodes remain a shallow description of the influence that resonates for Jacobs with each of these moments in his career, representing his career path in this way underscores that academic careers accrete with layers of influence and experience, much of which amalgamates in direct relation to programs of study, employing institutions, and the people inhabiting each of these at coincident times. Returning to the map, the eight survey respondents (former students) Jacobs mentored appear with hues corresponding to the stages of their respective careers, so Jay Dolmage, Jacobs’s first student at Windsor is in red, and Julie Kiernan; Jared Grogan; Janine Morris; Greg Paziuk; and also Stephanie Hedge, Daniel Richards, and Josh Mehler—a recent cohort who Jacobs referred to as “The Rhetorical Three” when I interviewed him in early December of 2013—are cast here in green hues corresponding to their being categorized as early career scholars. The career paths of Jacobs’ former students adhere to the synchronic model, with each appearing to move from one location to another, stopping through Windsor in most cases, before moving yet again to a doctoral program in the United States.

      The map sets up a distinctive way of understanding these nine scholars—Jacobs and eight former students—as belonging to a compound, cross-border mentorship network. The distant methods stop short of investigating this phenomenon as deeply as would be possible with other approaches. That is, there is much more to learn about the qualitative nature of these ties, the forms of interaction that cross distance and time sustain senses of connection and that operate as powerful, ongoing invitations to participate in the field as emerging scholars. Yet, based on what is knowable from the survey data and one interview with Jacobs, such a mentorship network might also serve as a model for scholars working in relative institutional isolation who seek to sponsor the disciplinary interests of master’s students and thereby welcome newcomers to the field, much in the same way Lunsford (1991) described in her definitional account of composition studies.

      The most significant takeaway from the survey data and inquiry atlas presented in his chapter is the way that visualizing mentorship networks across Canada and the United States, but also more generally, gains much from the use of compound reference points, one set geographic, in this case, and the second set drawn from explicitly articulated mentoring relationships. Combining the synchronic hub-mentor—Jacobs—and the diachronic through-passing-mentees—Dolmage, Kiernan, Grogan, Morriss, Paziuk, Hedge, Richards, and Mehler—suggests how one type of transnational influence manifests—that there is a strengthened sense in which Jacobs’s influence has conducted along these lines—to Waterloo (Dolmage), Michigan State University (Kiernan), Wayne State University (Grogan), University of Cincinnati (Morriss), University of Windsor (Paziuk), SUNY-Potsdam (Hedge), Old Dominion (Richards), and Florida State University (Mehler). At another degree removed, we can begin to understand how the influences of Joy Ritchie, Kate Ronald, and Robert Brooke, professors at Nebraska who Dale Jacobs identified as mentors, are similarly implicated in and constitutive of this disciplinary network. Jacobs isn’t at Waterloo, and yet he is. He isn’t at Old Dominion, but he is. He isn’t at SUNY-Potsdam, Michigan State, Florida State, Wayne State, or Cincinnati, but he is. Digital cartography is useful for seeing the emerging definitional shape of this network—for grasping an image of Dale Jacobs as simultaneously emplaced and distributed. Distant methods, such as the two types of surveying enacted here, may prime a variety of related investigations into writing studies, rhetoric and composition, and professional and technical communication as hosting numerous comparable networks, many of them proving powerfully impactful for the continuing growth and maturation of the field. These emplaced, distributed disciplinary networks are comparable to the field’s invisible colleges (Crane, 1972), and yet far more work is due if we are going to begin conceiving of them in this way, increasing their visibility, and realizing more completely our agency both in bringing them about and participating in them.

      There remains, of course, much more to explore in the three maps featured here. Such is the nature of an inquiry atlas—it is a pursuit designed to balance, on one hand, an indexical aereality in service of definitional shape-finding, and on the other, an open-ended and flexible resource useful for further exploration and for cross-referencing the gradually closer methodological approaches to disciplinary interdependence in the emphases on interviews, genre profiles, and cases presented in the following chapters.

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