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2 Emplaced Disciplinary Networks from Middle Altitude
Derek Mueller
Can a person visit a country yet never set foot upon it? Does an airplane journey across a territory entitle the traveler to claim that “he has been there”?
—William I. Fox, Aereality: On the World from Above
The following chapter advances contributions positioned methodologically as the most distant among the four approaches featured in this book. This portion of the broader study relies on low-touch research methods, such as data visualization and digital cartography, to gain initial perspective on matters of transnational interdependencies in writing studies. Generally, such methods are suited to gaining perspective on aggregate activity that would not otherwise be observable because the activity is scattered or dispersed unevenly or too broadly in space or time. Distant methods are applied extensively in other fields to bring to the surface non-obvious phenomena, and thus they may adapt well to disciplinary research questions about the continuing growth and maturation of writing studies. The as-distant-as-possible opening inquiry that follows surveys Canadian writing studies in two distinct but complementary senses: first, as a means of collecting responses to a uniform set of questions circulated among Canadian writing studies scholars (i.e., inviting responses to a survey) and second, as a systematic process of plotting scholarly activity as it occurs across a vast terrain (i.e., mapping both as attendant to physical geography and, figuratively, as concerns a varied epistemological landscape). Before delving into the chapter’s twin applications of surveying, however, a brief accounting for Canada’s physical geography is warranted because it establishes an orienting backdrop for understanding conditions underpinning the country’s still-evolving disciplinary geography. Following this geographic sketch and situating distant methods as an important first step for defining, or lending shape to, disciplinarity, the chapter turns in its second section to an annotated synopsis of results from a survey of 111 Canadian writing studies scholars, followed by a more refined, granular exploration of patterns in the career paths of the 55 respondents to the survey. That is, the third section of the chapter plots onto a series of three maps the geolocations of career activity as a way to investigate cross-border patterns and related mentorship networks. I refer to this definitional treatment involving maps and geolocations using the phrase indexical aereality because, while on the one hand its purpose is to seek out a unique perspective available from middle altitude (i.e., a high-flying bird’s-eye view), it is also among the limited number of cases in which disciplinary geographies have been plotted onto scalable, interactive digital maps. Indexical aereality approximates a fly-over logic, ways of thinly getting acquainted with basic qualities of disciplinary activity in Canada. Finally, based on the exploratory maps of career activity, the concluding portion of the study extends two different approaches taken with the career-path maps to theorize about value—as a model of disciplinary formation—in conceiving of a scholarly career as simultaneously emplaced and distributed. This final turn focuses on Dale Jacobs from the University of Windsor as its illustrative case while also demonstrating the significance of modest adjustments in scale for research that begins at the most distant, zoomed out perspective available.
Physical Geography, Disciplinary Terrain
Human and cultural geographers have since the 1970s theorized, studied, and demonstrated in case upon case the intricate relationship between physical and social geography (Harvey, 2001; Wood, 1992; Wood, 2010; Soja, 2011; MacEachren, 2004). Mindful of the well-documented intersections between space, place, and cultural activity, several accounts of Canadian writing studies provide context for the country’s disciplinary footprint, likewise acknowledging a linkage between the country’s massive, out-stretched landscape, the population centres and the universities they host, and the consequences of being separated by hundreds of kilometres from other scholars who identify disciplinarily (Graves & Graves, 2006; Coe, 1988). For example, Roger Graves’s (1993) account of composition in Canadian universities notes a total of 87 universities operating across the country; among 61 of the institutions surveyed in that study, more than three-quarters of them were located in the 6 eastern-most provinces (Ontario, Quebec, Newfoundland and Labrador, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia), a measurable Atlantic-coast-leaning that corresponds to the population distribution reflected in the 2011 census (Government of Canada, n.d.). Approximately 23 million of Canada’s 33.5 million people reside in these same provinces. Across all 10 provinces (i.e., territories notwithstanding), Canada’s population density (persons per square km) averages 8.8, whereas the population density in the United States was 33.8 as of 2010 (Mackun & Wilson, 2011). For the expansive Canadian landscape and the scholars who work there, modern telecommunications platforms have established relatively new means for connecting with colleagues at a distance, as the survey responses reflect later, though the point of this brief sketch is that Canada’s vast physical geography has bearing on disciplinary formation and the methodologies best for initial inquiries into such widely distributed activity. The inquiry that follows begins with distant methods because they provide an aperture adequate for initial inquiry into such an immense terrain.
Defining Disciplinary Activity: Essences, Differentiation, and Shape-Finding
Over the past two decades, traditional accounts of research by writing studies scholars have documented, and thereby lent visibility to, disciplinary activity in and across Canada. In “Shifting Tradition: Writing Research in Canada,” Jennifer Clary-Lemon (2009) retraces several such studies and characterizes one cluster of them as fitting with “scholarship of definition,” which “seeks to name and define a Canadian context of teaching, writing, and research” so as to “carve out a space uniquely [Canadian] in in a landscape dominated by American practices” (p. 99). According to Clary-Lemon’s review of numerous books and articles, these studies reflect distinct, varied circumferences, from highly localized characterizations