Cross-Border Networks in Writing Studies

Book excerpt: Cross-Border Networks in Writing Studies coordinates mixed methods approaches to survey, interview, and case study data to study Canadian writing studies scholars. The authors argue for networked disciplinarity, the notion that ideas arise and flow through intellectual networks that connect scholars not only to one another but to widening networks of human and nonhuman actors. Although 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, more recent research suggests a more hybridized North American scholarship rather than one defined in opposition to “rhetoric and composition” in the US. In tracing identities, roles, and rituals of nationally bound considerations of how disciplinarity has been constructed through distant and close methods, this multi-scaled, multi-scopic approach examines the texture of interdependent constructions of the Canadian discipline. Cross-Border Networks in Writing Studies also launches a collaborative publishing network between Canadian publisher Inkshed and US publisher Parlor Press.