“It is important to understand the complex ways that individuals, in becoming enculturated into a discipline, form their own professional identities through their participation not only in intellectual communities of practice—often more than one—but also in multiple other activity systems. I am particularly interested in the emotional investments people make when they identify with intellectual networks as disciplinary and draw emotional energy for creative work from their interactions.” (Phelps, 2014, p. 10).
As we will show here, the connections between different territoires, both within and across national borders, are both spatial and temporal, for as scholars relocate geographically they nonetheless maintain connections to people they have known and to places they have previously inhabited. The multiple methods used in this book trace these complex interactions among place, identity, and community (whether rooted in a local territoire or a more symbolic one such as a disciplinary organization).
It is in this respect that we believe Canadian writing studies can serve as a case study that exemplifies the kinds of factors—cultural, economic, geographic, and linguistic, for example, or the organizational structure of a national academy—that inform whether and how such networks arise and successfully establish writing studies in particular countries and regions at particular historical moments and periods. Despite its own distinctive history and geography, we suspect that the field of Canadian writing studies shares many conditions with other countries, such as its distributed and fractured institutional location in a hierarchically structured academy that excludes and renders both writing and writing studies invisible, and the consequent challenges of securing tenure-track positions and research funding.
By offering Canada as a case of how local conditions and cross-border relations can both facilitate and hinder the development of disciplinarity and academic identity, we hope that our coordinated studies will provide insights for understanding parallel processes, obstacles, constraints, and enabling factors in other countries. We are interested in the affordances of border crossing for disciplinarity, particularly in the case of disciplines that are still struggling to achieve academic identity, as in the case of Canadian writing studies, and how such efforts can be supported by transnational networks. Canada’s shared border and common language with the US (at least for Anglo-Canadians), along with its relatively similar cultural traditions to the US, invites consideration of how such collaboration might work across borders that are both more and less geographically removed as well as culturally and linguistically porous. At the same time, we believe that by looking at the histories of writing studies in Canada and the US as intertwined, rather than discrete, our study will prompt revisionist historical studies that “complicate and challenge the conclusions drawn by more general earlier histories” (Gold, 2012, p. 16).
“While ‘the academy’ is now globalized, it still matters for intellectual networks, if they are to operate practically as communities, that they have a primary base and identity in their own country’s educational system, its national academy” (Phelps, 2014, p. 9).
In the spirit of transnational disciplinary inquiry, then, we hope that both the data and the mode of inquiry offered here will be useful to a wide range of scholars doing disciplinary invention, historiography, and program development in writing studies not only in Canada and the US but also in their own national and cultural contexts. As Bazerman, et al. (2010) showed, there is rich work going on worldwide in writing studies that engages a wide variety of approaches, emphases, communities, and perspectives. What the work of international writing studies researchers have in common, however, is that each international context must necessarily respond to its local and specific circumstances—and we hope that the Canadian case that we showcase here offers a useful glimpse into the complexities of building and professionalizing a discipline. For as Phelps (2014) argued, although disciplines may be international, academic identity, because it is rooted in funding and institutional structures, is national, and can be strengthened by cross-border connections.
Finally, although this project studies networks not for their own sake but because disciplines are formed and sustained by means of the connections among scholars, we hope that the design of this study will interest writing studies scholars working with mixed method approaches to research, as well as those working collaboratively with multi-scaled or multiscopic data. Our purpose here is to both engage in and model what Fleckenstein, Spinuzzi, Papper, and Rickly (2008) term an ecological orientation to research projects that embrace “research diversity: multiple sites of immersion, multiple perspectives, and multiple methodologies within a particular discipline and research project” (p. 401) and that honour the boundaries of traditional methods while learning to re-invent and blur such boundaries in response to rhetorical constraints (see also Rickly, 2012). Thus we believe our work here offers a model and a view of the kinds of research called for in twenty-first century writing studies by scholars such as Gesa Kirsch (1992), Anne DiPardo and Melanie Sperling (2004), and John Law (2008), who speak to pluralistic and rhetorically rigorous—but “messy”—methods of research design and data collection.
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