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3 Voicing Scholars’ Networked Identities through Interviews

Andrea Williams

Introduction

Whereas the previous chapter visualized the scholarly networks that comprise writing studies in Canada, including Canadian-American interdependencies, this chapter gives voice to the networked locations and identities of fourteen scholars through interviews that probe these scholars’ perceptions of their disciplinary locations and identities and how these have been shaped by their relationships with other people (such as teachers, mentors, and collaborators), institutions, professional organizations, and events such as conferences. The scholars interviewed for this chapter include Natasha Artemeva, Doug Brent, Rick Coe, Jay Dolmage, Aviva Freedman, Roger Graves, Dale Jacobs, Lorelei Lingard, Anthony Paré, Margaret Procter, Dan Richards, Cathy Schryer, Ron Sheese, and Graham Smart. As Mueller (2012) has argued, distant methodologies can help “corroborate” the “local, tacitly felt impressions about changing disciplinary conditions,” which are examined here (p. 196). This analysis of individual scholars’ accounts of their introduction to the discipline and subsequent career trajectory foregrounds both the deliberate and serendipitous encounters—with texts, people, events, and organizations—that shape scholarly careers and that comprise larger disciplinary activity. In exploring the interpersonal ties that have connected these scholars to classmates, teachers, mentors, colleagues, collaborators, and friends as well as institutions and professional organizations, this chapter provides an alternative way to represent scholarly networks than the maps presented in the previous one. Phelps and Ackerman (2010) examined the importance of disciplinary identity to sustaining “the working identities of practitioners, scholars, and teachers across the US” (p. 181) in writing studies. In giving voice to these scholars’ evolving identities and networks, this project contributes to efforts to strengthen the disciplinary identity of writing studies in Canada.

I approach this study of cross-border scholarly networks as someone whose own involvement in writing studies has crossed national borders: a dual Canadian-American citizen born and raised in Canada, I completed my first two degrees in Canada, my doctoral studies in the United States, and have worked in both countries in various institutional roles and locations. Like many of the scholars interviewed for this study, I first encountered writing studies (or rhetoric and composition as it was and still is called by many) by chance1 and have ever since been interested in its disciplinary history and status in Canada, particularly its close connection to the American field and more recent connections to the international field. One of the issues this chapter explores is how, given the situation of these Canadian scholars, the discipline as a whole has taken root in marginal soil, i.e., in the absence of a traditional institutional home in the way that first-year composition in the United States has given composition and rhetoric an identity and institutional place, despite its often subterranean location (Miller, 1991). For if composition scholars in the United States have often been relegated to the basement, writing studies scholars in Canada have, as I will show, often had to couch surf—i.e., find institutional places for themselves and their work by collaborating with or joining other disciplines.

In examining the networked presences of these fourteen Canadian scholars,2 I first discuss the role of conferences such as the Conference on College Composition and Communication (known as “4C’s”), Inkshed, and the Canadian Association for the Study of Discourse and Writing (CASDW) in introducing newer scholars to the field and providing communities that support more advanced scholars. As the previous chapter demonstrates, the field in Canada is characterized by widely distributed activity, yet there are also more concentrated areas or institutional hubs of disciplinary activity, three of which I analyze here: the Carleton University group, the University of Windsor, and the University of Toronto (a fourth hub, the University of Winnipeg, is also discussed in chapter 5). From the inception of writing studies in Canada, the movement of scholars between Canada and the United States has followed a largely bidirectional pattern with many Canadian graduate students going to the United States for graduate studies and faculty appointments and many American scholars, particularly in the early days of the field, accepting roles at Canadian universities. Through interviews with individual scholars, I have sought to understand how they saw their intellectual and disciplinary development and their relationship to scholarly networks. In doing so, I aim to contribute to our understanding of the interchange of ideas, texts, and events such as conferences that comprise disciplinary networks in Canadian writing studies.

The data analyzed here were generated from semi-structured interviews, which provide a useful mode of inquiry for understanding the meaning people make of their experience (Seidman, 2006). Interviews were conducted with a cross-section of scholars to evoke participants’ rich, complex, and varied accounts of their own evolving scholarly identities and networks, an approach to scholarly networks that complements the others presented in this book. We interviewed fourteen Canadian scholars from thirteen different institutions across Canada and the United States, choosing participants to represent the major strands of Canadian writing studies as identified by Clary-Lemon (2009): rhetorical genre studies, writing across the curriculum, and professional and technical communication. In addition to choosing a cross-section of scholars by research area, we3 also interviewed scholars at different stages in their career (early, middle, and later) and included scholars who had studied, worked, or continue to work and live in Canada and the United States. “Snowball sampling” was also used to select participants, a method whereby interviewees recommend additional participants, a particularly appropriate technique for a study of scholarly networks.

We asked participants about their heroines and heroes, mentors, mentees, or former students; how they locate (and have located) themselves (whether by institution, region, nation, discipline, research field, and/or other groups); the disciplinary or interdisciplinary fields and research specializations they have identified with; and whether, how, and why these identifications have changed over time. To learn about their affiliations, we asked participants about their memberships in professional and mentoring networks, collaborators and co-investigators, and about their roles in scholarly and professional organizations. (Appendix A has a complete list of our questions.) Interviews ranged from thirty-five minutes to over an hour and were conducted and recorded over Skype except for the interview with Dale Jacobs, which was done in person. Three of us (Mueller, Phelps, and Williams) conducted the interviews and I transcribed all but one myself, which helped familiarize me with the data.

Rapley (2001) has argued that interviews are a form of “artful social interaction” (p. 309) in which both interviewer and interviewee perform particular selves, which has implications for how interviews should be analyzed: if interview data are not windows onto a neutral reality outside the interview but are instead collaboratively produced and context-specific interactions, then interviewers’ talk should be included along with that of interviewees. I followed this practice in transcribing the audio recordings, a process that reminded me that participants’ discourse is always shaped not only by what questions are asked, but also by whom and how they are asked. Although space constraints permit me to quote only selectively and therefore include only the interviewees’ responses, acknowledging the partiality of any one source of data reinforces the value of using different methodological approaches together as we have done in our coordinated studies of scholarly networks in Canadian writing studies. Since interviews are themselves a form of social interaction, my method echoes our object of study: the social nature of scholarly networks that originate in face-to-face relationships and are forged in particular geographical and historical contexts.