transformative notions of the network. By including genres whose functions in mediating disciplinarity have been overlooked, chapter 4 examines relationships among genre, transnational scholarly identity, and presence that can’t be explained by indices and citation analysis, with a view to challenging traditional disciplinary accounts and histories.
In chapter 5, “A Case-Study Approach to Examining Cross-Border Networks,” Jennifer Clary-Lemon adopts the most localized of the methodologies featured in the study. In examining the University of Winnipeg’s movement from intrinsic to instrumental case study, chapter 5 focuses in on a person-locale nodal connection. Clary-Lemon explores interdependencies from an institutional locale, comparing centrifugal and centripetal influences in the circulation of disciplinary influence into and out of a single institution. This chapter also highlights the transformative element of a networked approach by attending to the ways one networked locale illustrates the concept of interdependency over time and in conflicting ways.
In the conclusion to this volume, chapter 6, we draw together the insights gleaned by examining the concept of Canadian-American interdependencies in writing studies from the multiple scales and perspectives taken up in our individual chapters. Here, we collectively examine what kinds of “black-box” knowledge the survey, interview, and case-study data, taken together, provide in allowing researchers to manage, filter, and make sense of the complexity presented by doing multi-scopic work. In acknowledging nodal links among people, geolocations, documents, and locales, this chapter enacts the balancing work of interdependency as a black box: on one hand, stabilizing the interface of what we know about transnational scholarship; on the other, recognizing that that stability is always partial and temporary.
Taken together, we see the coordinated studies in our book as constituting a new methodological approach to multi-scopic forms of inquiry into one subject, serving our purpose of examining the contemporary and historical networks of Canadian writing studies as they have emerged in the last half-century.
The Role of Cross-Border Scholarly Networks: Canadian Writing 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”
