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1 Becoming Networked, Cross-Border Scholars: Sources and Development of the Project

Derek Mueller, Andrea Williams, Louise Wetherbee Phelps, and Jennifer Clary-Lemon

It’s always a bit arbitrary to pinpoint the origin of a project or piece of writing, but our cross-border collaboration began with Jennifer Clary-Lemon’s initiative to bring Louise Wetherbee Phelps from the US to the University of Winnipeg as a Fulbright Specialist Scholar in the spring of 2011, to consult and collaborate with the Department of Rhetoric, Writing, and Communications on a vision for its future development. Winnipeg’s anomalous history in Canada as a longstanding independent writing department with an American-style first-year program and a major in rhetoric and communications made this cross-border consultation especially appropriate. Based on Louise’s work on the Visibility Project seeking recognition for rhetoric and composition as a research field in American higher education (Phelps and Ackerman, 2010), Jennifer’s proposal envisioned that the project could not only inform the department’s own strategic planning but also promote greater visibility and agency for writing studies as a discipline in the Canadian academy. Jennifer, herself a dual citizen with an American doctorate, emphasized the potential for cross-border conversations to use complementary strengths and develop the field both nationally and internationally.

“The project’s outcome will be . . . one of the only existing attempts at co-constructing knowledge about a North American (rather than simply American) concept of writing studies, drawing on the strength and history of the development of the field in the United States, and the innovation and initiative of fledgling programs in Canada.” (Clary-Lemon, Fulbright proposal)

To further these goals, part of Louise’s commission was to research various contexts for understanding the department’s history, character, and potential future: a local perspective, situating it in the university, the city of Winnipeg, and the region; a comparative perspective, placing its curriculum in the landscape of Canadian instructional programs in writing and rhetoric and, contrastively, undergraduate and graduate programs in the US; and a field perspective, examining the department in the context of discourse and writing studies as a still-emerging scholarly field in the Canadian academy, interlinked with US rhetoric and composition and contributing to international writing studies. To fulfill this charge, Louise read widely in Canadian scholarship on writing and rhetoric, including publications by faculty at Winnipeg; studied websites and writings on Canadian programs; and interviewed several Canadian scholars at other institutions by phone and Skype. She was particularly informed by Jennifer’s own inventory of Canadian scholarship (Clary-Lemon, 2009), the first to survey Canadian research and publication in writing studies as distinct from instructional programs. This article examined how the Canadian field is historically rooted in the themes of location and national culture, expressing a tension between Canadian independence and dependence on the US field, with more recent research such as the new genre theory exemplifying a more hybridized North American scholarship rather than one defined in opposition to “rhetoric and composition” in the US.

“Canadian scholarship has shown itself as loyal to its historical themes of location and national culture . . . ; yet at the same time, there are, and must be, hybrid systems that blend the best research and practice of North America, as dual citizens and Canadians with American rhet/comp PhD specializations enter the picture.” (Clary-Lemon, 2009, p. 105)

After Louise completed her report (Phelps, 2011), it was taken up by the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Communications as a starting point for curricular revision at Winnipeg (discussed in chapter 4). The following spring Jennifer, Louise, and other Winnipeg faculty (Judith Kearns, Jaqueline McLeod Rogers, and Tracy Whalen) presented a roundtable at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (“4Cs”) on the Fulbright collaboration (March, 2012). Their session, “Cross-Border Collaboration in Charting a Department’s Future: Toward a North-American Conception of Rhetoric and Writing Studies,” placed the project’s cross-border conversations in the context of an “evolving, convergent, (inter)disciplinarity in North American rhetoric and writing studies,” which in turn was being integrated into an increasingly interdisciplinary and internationalized field of writing studies (4Cs roundtable proposal, 2011).

Shortly before meeting at 4Cs that year, Louise and Jennifer exchanged emails about building on this work to develop a proposal for the 2014 Writing Research across Borders (WRAB) international conference in Paris. Louise also contacted American scholar Derek Mueller about joining the group, suggesting that they could use his methodological skills to study Canadian scholarly networks. She was inspired by a 4Cs presentation on the Writing Studies Tree, a visual, crowd-sourced map of the genealogy of American scholars that was being built by some City University of New York (CUNY) graduate students. Wondering how the Tree might be extended or emulated to map Canadian scholars, Louise thought immediately of Derek, a former student at Syracuse University who had been pursuing his interests in “distant” methods, mapping, and visualization of data since graduate school. Derek and Louise contacted the CUNY team about working together on this project, but despite strong interest from graduate student Ben Miller and the faculty leader of the project, Sondra Perl, plans for combining forces and developing correlated proposals for WRAB in Paris didn’t work out. Instead Derek went forward with his own mapping project, using survey data (see chapter 2). However, as we worked toward our own plans and methods for exploring scholarly networks, we remained inspired by the CUNY team’s pioneering project to look at scholarly networks, in part, through the lenses foregrounded in the Tree: person-to-person relations (genealogical/mentoring; collegial/co-location); and person-to-institution relations (educational; workplace).

Meanwhile, at the invitation of Canadian scholar Doug Brent, Louise was preparing a keynote talk for the Canadian Association for the Study of Discourse and Writing (CASDW) conference in May, 2012 in Waterloo, Ontario. At his request, she drew together lessons from her Winnipeg studies to compare the struggles for disciplinary recognition in the United States for rhetoric and composition to those in Canada for discourse and writing. Responding to Canadian writing scholars’ ambivalence about their “pushme-pullyou conflict with American sites and conceptions of rhetoric and writing” (Clary-Lemon, 2009, p. 97), Louise suggested deconstructing and reconstructing this historical binary between dependence and independence so that “the Canadian discipline need not think of itself any more as defined either by imitation or opposition” to US writing studies (Phelps, 2014, p. 17). This movement toward a conception of Canadian-US interdependence, foreshadowed by Jennifer in her article and the Fulbright proposal, echoed in the Winnipeg roundtable at 4CS, and taken up by Louise in this address, shaped our ongoing planning for the research project we would propose for the WRAB conference in Paris.

“We sort of zeroed in on the idea of focusing on the interdependence of American (US) and Canadian writing studies—mutual influence, partnerships, cross-fertilization through graduate education—within a framework of difference. It seemed that we are playing with a set of polarities: independence/interdependence, disciplinarity vs. academic identity, disciplinarity vs. diffuse interdisciplinarity, plus methodologies at different scales.” (Email from Louise to Derek and Jennifer on planning the proposal)

Louise’s reading for her CASDW talk included Randall Collins’s The Sociology of Philosophies (2000), which offers a global theory of how intellectual networks operate to develop, debate, and circulate ideas, emphasizing the synchrony of thought and social relationships. His essential insight, that intellectual activity is a flow of ideas among people energized and informed by their engagement with one another, reinforced the interest we shared in exploring scholarly networks, especially genealogical ones, as a way of understanding how disciplines form, develop, and sustain themselves.

These experiences, meetings, readings, and interchanges all fed into our proposal for the 2014 WRAB conference in Paris as we began putting it together in February, 2013, now including Andrea Williams, a Canadian scholar and writing program administrator who had met Louise at the CASDW conference. Andrea would add an interview-based qualitative study to what we were now thinking of as a multi-methodological study of “interdependencies and cross-pollination between Canadian and U.S. writing studies” (proposal for WRAB 2014). Our methods would use different scales of description, ranging from “distant to close,” to describe the role of transnational networks in shaping and sustaining writing studies in both countries. Collectively, we would gather data through surveys and interviews of Canadian scholars that all of us could draw on; individually, we would employ methods including data visualization, digital mapping, qualitative analysis of interviews, case study, and historical and textual inquiry.

After working on these research goals interactively over the next year, we came away from the Paris conference with a plan for co-authoring this book, which in many respects fulfills our original goals but has also evolved in ways we couldn’t have foreseen.

“In this symposium a team of two Canadian and two U.S. researchers will combine methodologies at different scales of description to demonstrate the vital role of transnational networks in shaping and sustaining writing studies in both Canada and the United States. These studies, challenging the common trope of Canadian writing studies developing in opposition to its U.S. counterpart, explore an array of reciprocal relationships: genealogy, partnership, adaptation of model, mentorship, mutual presence.” (Proposal for WRAB 2014)

You may wonder why we have told this story of how we got together, planned this project, and came to put our work together in this collaborative book. It’s not special in any way—most co-authors or co-editors of books in our field have had similar experiences. They seldom detail the process for readers, wonder what makes it possible, or examine how it works. It’s taken for granted, along with all the features of disciplinarity (for example, conferences) that we recognize as “professional” but seldom study to find out how they actually afford intellectual activity. In fact, making all that visible is one point of our study. In tracing this history, we see the kinds of affordances for, and examples of, the very intersection of intellectual and social relations that we set out to identify and study in this project:

 co-location of scholars in the same place (graduate school, a consultancy)

 mentorship, beginning with genealogical relations (senior to junior) and then evolving to mutual mentorship in the context of collegial relations and collaboration

 collaborating on research, on publication, on curricular review and revision

 connecting one another to other scholars in extended scholarly networks (for example, the process by which we identified Canadian scholars to survey and interview)

 reading one another’s published writing

 connecting through common organizations

 attending (cross-border) conferences: meeting to discuss projects, hearing one another’s presentations, presenting together

 referring each other to scholarly ideas and texts

 using technologies like Skype, email, and Google Docs to work together and keep in contact.

In other words, this history introduces us as networked, cross-border scholars, a microcosm of what we are studying. We are Canadians and Americans, insiders and outsiders to one another’s scholarly communities and cultures, different generations, from different institutions. We brought to this project different but overlapping inspirations, histories, knowledge bases, methods, and home contexts. The book in its final form reflects the evolution of both goals and methods through the reciprocal influence of our different roles and contributions to the project. Most importantly, we have increasingly knitted them together into blended, coordinated, and complementary—“networked”—methods for understanding the development of disciplines, ideas, and scholars in terms of scholarly networks.

A Networked Methodological Approach

Our study of Canada-US writing studies interdependencies enacts what we identify as a “networked methodological approach.” We consider this approach novel because it applies network logics to the design and execution of a collaborative, mixed methods research project. This “networked methodological approach” is influenced by disparate theoretical insights from network studies. Generally, network studies provide theoretical perspectives useful for attending to fluid structures of activity and relationships that may be articulated through links and nodes or simple, granular models of complex phenomena. Counter to isolating phenomena at too narrow or bounded a scope or, on the other hand, relinquishing a tightly-delineated scope to comparably baggy and inclusive references such as community or field, our use of networks for this research circumscribes the work with principles of delineated but flexible interconnection (i.e., locating connections that operate between and among differing methodological distances) and discernible granularity at scale (i.e., forms of evidence appropriate to a suite of methodologies, operating in concert).

Our reference to networks in this approach acknowledges a well-established, extensive tradition involving considerable topical and methodological variation where interconnected, complex phenomena are concerned. Social Network Analysis (SNA) has been widely adopted in quantitative sociology for more than three decades, offering greater technical precision in both modeling and measuring relationships among links and nodes (Wasserman & Faust, 1994). By contrast and with a far greater emphasis on tracing non-obvious connections using field observation and descriptive accounts, Actor-Network Theory (ANT) has influenced numerous studies that draw upon network vocabulary as researchers seek to follow human and non-human actors, from science and technology studies (see Latour, 1996) and interdisciplinary field studies in forest ecology (see Latour, 1999) to political philosophy (see Latour, 2004) and urban infrastructure (Winner, 1986; Woolgar & Cooper, 1999). Still other research on networks has framed them as a way to explain material and organismic phase transitions, or shifts at a moment of criticality from seeming chaos to pattern or order (Strogatz, 2004; Barabási & Frangos, 2002; Buchanan, 2003). Yet more network studies research has been used to theorize tensions between a rising technocracy and educational reform (Taylor, 2003) and to examine contemporary sociocultural power relations (Castells, 2009; Benkler, 2007; Galloway & Thacker, 2007). Although this is by no means a comprehensive gloss, it sufficiently locates a rich backdrop of network-oriented adaptations for inquiry and scholarly research, pointing toward the ways in which network logic encourages a methodological range of modeling, measuring, observation, analysis, narrativizing, and theorizing.

“Network studies generally have established that phenomena observable at one scale of activity are not necessarily observable or structurally equivalent at another scale. For instance, patterns of cross-border activity in which Canadian scholars complete BAs and MAs in Canada are demonstrable only on a local, anecdotal level, unless we ask the question . . . using a large-scale survey and distant readings methods to visualize the cross-border pattern of activity. Such a large scale and distant study, however, proves insufficient for helping us grasp the micro-level influence of a brief consultation visit from a U.S. scholar to a Canadian university.” (Book prospectus)

Recently and more proximate to the domain of writing studies, Swarts’s entry in Keywords in Writing Studies (2015) differentiates network as a noun from network as a verb, noting that networks emerge as “settings in which new kinds of literate information gathering, processing, and composing practices emerge” (p. 121). It is in this sense of co-location and connection that our carrying out of related, coordinated methodologies manifests, as an interdependent, orchestrated—and thus “networked”—series of operations. That is, each methodology, highlighted chapter by chapter, is tied to and intertwined with each other’s methodology. To ground our thinking about these ties and intertwining, Gochenour’s “Nodalism” (2011) has been helpful for its articulation of networks as a structural metaphor that keys on nuanced structural attunement. This attunement is most apparent in cooperative modeling, in which part and whole function more smoothly together because of their being doubly constituted as nodes and as elements in an integrated system (para. 23–24).

The most apt synthesis of networks relevant to our methodological approach stems from Spinuzzi’s Network (2008), which through its focus on workplace studies offers a definitional orientation to networks and simultaneously recognizes their methodological promise at the intersection of activity theory and Actor-Network Theory, a “synchretism” (p. 197) of grounded description and pragmatic, problem-solution exploration. Spinuzzi argues that networks share four characteristics: they are heterogeneous, multiply linked, transformative, and black-boxed. We find these principles harmonious with our interdependencies research in the following ways:

1.Networks are heterogeneous, Spinuzzi explains, because they are “constituted through relationships or associations among elements” (p. 198). For Spinuzzi as for us, these relationships are dynamic, only ever achieving relative, temporary stability. In the context of our studying Canada-US interdependencies for writing studies, this might refer to the relocation of a survey respondent from one location to another; the network of associations fluctuates accordingly, and this type of change is constant.

2.Networks are multiply linked, and this is achieved through what Spinuzzi terms weaving and splicing (p. 198). Weaving refers to the development of relatively stable parts of a network over time, whereas splicing refers to branching that converges as new interaction. For this study of Canada-US interdependencies, this has been realized methodologically as weaving in our coordinated efforts to have, for example, the survey results inform the interview questions, and, in turn, to have outreach for interviews cycle back into new survey results. In terms of splicing, a networked methodological approach operates as multiply linked in the discovery of unplanned convergence, such as when an interview informs a closer-up perspective on a smaller selection of maps developed from the survey’s geolocative data.

3.Networks are transformative. Spinuzzi discusses this quality in terms of circulating representations, that a network “must represent and reprepresent phenomena in various ways, often conflicting ways” (p. 199). Representations and re-representations are constituted among the people, texts, narratives, identifications, institutions, and locations detailed in the study. The mélange of representations coheres around questions of interdependence, yet the assortment of evidence answers to interdependency with considerable variation. The network transforms as these representations and re-representations circulate, and our work has, as it evolved, participated in that transformative endeavour.

4.Networks yield “black boxes”, which means they subsume and eventually obscure constitutive qualities that would be too complex to revisit with description or examination. That is, black boxes reduce complexity by replacing complex qualities with satisfactory stand-ins. This is represented in our work by survey and interview questions that center on nation-based identification. As Spinuzzi attests, black boxes “emerge from historically developing activities” (p. 199)—in this case, citizenship activities that asked respondents to identify themselves along a contained and historicized North-American boundary. Yet Spinnuzi also notes that these boxes “take a lot of work to achieve and maintain” (p. 199), and these complexities came to light as scholars discussed their nation-based identification in greater and more varied detail in the interviews.

In addition to these principles introduced by Spinuzzi, what we frame here as a “networked methodological approach” adds a fifth principle: networks afford and also therefore obligate researchers to multi-scale and multi-scopic consideration of the assemblage. This resembles Spinuzzi’s point about transformation insofar as it considers materially circulating representations; however, this additional principle introduces deliberate, purposeful considerations of scale (distance versus close) and aperture (wide versus narrow). Much like Johanek’s (2000) argument that we must systematize inquiry in order to contextualize research in the service of both flexibility and multidisciplinarity (p. 207), we suggest that one focus of research—here, the historic development and movement of Canadian and US writing studies scholars across the North American border that frame interdependence—may be better understood with “network sense” (Mueller, 2012) developed by mixed methods. Our individual chapters embrace different scales and different lenses in studying interdependence as both node and element, part and whole.

“The methods drawn together in this study are themselves interwoven, connecting across the multiple scales to ‘bring networks out of hiding’ (Latour, 1993) across different scales of activity. . . . The methods themselves form a systematic inquiry, operating as interdependently as the Canada-U.S. influences the study brings to light as a whole.” (Book prospectus)

Chapter 2, “Emplaced Disciplinary Net­works from Middle Altitude,” written by Derek Mueller, posits its approach at the greatest distance, inquiring into relationships among survey respondents and the geographic locations they identify with. This chapter emphasizes the notion of network heterogeneity in terms of a person-geolocation nodal connection. The chapter’s use of interactive maps assumes a broad scale and wide scope to attend to patterned movement, particularly for the critical mass of Canada-based writing studies scholars who have taken up doctoral programs of study in the US before returning to Canadian universities. In tandem with the maps, the chapter presents summary findings from a survey concerned with geolocation and professional identification. These low-touch, distant methods work together to engage non-obvious phenomena in an attempt to get at the big picture of cross-border interdependencies, and provide a broad back-drop to the research featured in other chapters.

Andrea Williams’s chapter 3, ““Voicing Scholars’ Networked Identities through Interviews,” shifts to a slightly closer-up scale and narrower aperture in its interview-based methodology. In focusing in on person-to-person nodal connections in a network frame, the methodological emphasis here is on showing the multiply linked, relational aspects of a network, as well as the narrative representation and re-representation of conflicting perceptions of intellectual communities, such as the varied interpretation of organizations and conferences like the 4Cs, Inkshed/CASSL, and CATTW in creating and maintaining professional identities. In addition to tracing shifts in individual scholars’ identities, this chapter explores the different kinds of institutional hubs where Canadian scholars have clustered and their relation to the discipline in Canada and internationally. The interview-based methodology and thematic narrativizing of insights from the interviews both complements and intersects with the methodologies featured in the other chapters.

Chapter 4, “Four Scholars, Four Genres: Networked Trajectories,” by Louise Wetherbee Phelps, focuses even more tightly than chapter 3 on the networked individual, profiling the careers of four Canadian scholars to illuminate their participation in social networks over time and space. But it introduces a new element to our concept of networks by pairing each scholar with a genre, using their writings in these genres to trace their overlapping interpersonal and intertextual trajectories through multiple contexts. Beginning with the nodal connection of person-to-text (often already person-to-person through co-authorship or co-editing), chapter 4 expands the aperture to encompass layers of historical and contemporaneous connections among persons, places, institutions, organizations, events, texts, and documents, emphasizing the multiply linked and 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” (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, by linking individuals and their small networks in layered ways into larger ones. After all, although scholars are rooted in their local contexts, they often derive their intellectual energy and identities from their networked connections to people, texts, institutions, organizations, and events that may be far from their home territoire.

“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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