What's the Deal?

Does anybody know what is going on with the Journal of Writing Research? Issue 1:1 came out last June, and the website mentions 3-4 issues per year. But there's been nothing since.

There are lots of reasons a journal might move more slowly than anticipated. I'm just hoping that that's what's happening, and not that the economic maelstrom has claimed another victim.

Activity Theory Bibliography

As promised, here's the activity theory bibliography (.xml file) Jeremy Schnieder and I put together. It's a work-in-progress, so if you have any suggestions of sources to add, we'd appreciate hearing from you.

A few caveats:

• Jeremy and I did not set out to create a document for public consumption; rather, we are simply compiling a list of sources for a project we're working on. As a result, we didn't worry at this stage about things like consistent or proper formatting, and there are a few entries that have incomplete data or that are "meta" entries meant to hold the place of more specific sources.
  


• So, while you're welcome to use this bibliography however you see fit (within the guidelines of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License), please note that it's not a presentation quality document.
  
  
• Some of the sources are pretty far afield to be called "writing studies," even broadly defined, but we're leaving them on for now.

We'll update the document as the project progresses. I'm especially looking foward to having it annotated, which (we hope) will happen sometime early in the new year.

Endless Summer

This is the first year I've managed not to delude myself into thinking summer will be filled with vast expanses of unstructured, free time in which I can:

• Research
• Landscape/garden
• Visit friends
• Do a fix-it project a week on the house
• Research
• Plan classes
• Start a regular exercise regimen
• Research

But not being deluded doesn't doesn't help. (Try to slog your way through that syntax.) My heart still drops into my stomach when I think of all I have to get done. Among other things:

• Everything on the above list, and more

Next year I think I'll let myself be deluded, if I can get back through that looking glass.

Forecast: Intermittent Blogging

While I certainly won't do the disappearing act I did last summer (when we moved twice and prepared for new jobs), I will likely only be blogging sporadically at best over the next couple-to-three weeks. With the end of the semester, summer travel plans, and various deadlines, things will just not be blogging-friendly around here for a while.

And speaking of deadlines, because we were only recently able to get our cfp into certain journals, Rick and I have decided to accept proposals for our project until June to give those journals' readers a fair chance to respond. FYI.

On the Ethics of Disciplinary Conflict

I haven't posted anything in nearly a week, mostly because it's the end of the semester and I've been trying to translate a paper on the ethics of disciplinary reading and writing into a talk I'm giving to my department Tuesday.

In lieu of a real post, then, here's an excerpt from the paper's conclusion:

As Gary Olson writes: “Since the beginnings of composition as a discipline, we all have been struggling over how to define it, over its heart and soul” (30). True, Olson’s melodramatic rendering may overstate the stakes of disciplinary debate. But it should be clear by now that heart and soul, as the figurative repositories of those most affective aspects of our being, are very much a part of “composition as an intellectual discipline” (Olson 31). Equally true is that, so far, my portrayal of this struggle suggests a model of disciplinary conflict in which each stakeholder has an equal footing, in which each group possesses the same power to influence the theoretical, methodological, and practical directions the discipline will follow. But that, of course, is not the case. Irrespective of how amorphous, how open, how contested we choose to conceive of disciplinary communities, and irrespective of whether we imagine such communities to be oriented abstractly around shared epistemic values or concretely around material social practices, we must, I feel, acknowledge that disciplines derive much of their vitality from the give-and-take of the many different and—by some measures—distinct subdisciplinary systems that they comprise. That is, they derive their vitality from disequilibrium: the “energy” of disciplines is, as in all complex social systems, necessarily distributed unevenly. Indeed, disequilibrium may even be understood to be a precondition of complex social organization (Reed and Harvey). Such is the very essence of the idea of a paradigm, after all: certain groups possess disproportionate control of a discipline’s intellectual and material resources (things like editorial control of journals, representation in disciplinary governing bodies, and ability to procure grant monies).

Given, then, that it is not unreasonable to talk about groups of compositionists being in sometimes heated disagreement with other groups; given as well that the source of such “heat” is precisely the fact that our disciplinary and intellectual identities are deeply, fundamentally affective; and, finally, given that some groups tend to hold more disciplinary sway than others; then it is also not unreasonable to suggest that the “struggle” over the “heart and soul” of the discipline should be subject to similar concerns about politics and social justice as those of macrosocially-oriented identity politics.

fwiw

Let's Make Some More Knowledge

You may have seen the following CFP in comp/rhet/English journals recently, but in case you haven't, I'm posting it here:

We invite proposals for essays for a collection that draws on the upcoming 25th anniversary of Stephen North’s The Making of Knowledge in Composition (MKC) as an occasion to assess the discipline of composition and its future. Because MKC remains one of composition’s monumental works, we invite retrospective accounts (rhetorical and critical analyses, reception histories, reflective narratives, and other scholarly treatments) of North’s unreservedly sweeping, undoubtedly important, and undeniably controversial book.

Rather than being merely retrospective, this collection seeks works that critically re-assess such things as MKC’s influence/impact, rhetoric, aims, and values--with an eye toward using such re-assessments to comment on the present and future of composition studies. By May 2007, please attach 500 word proposals to the editors, Lance Massey (lmassey@bgnet.bgsu.edu) and Richard Gebhardt (richgeb@bgnet.bgsu.edu).

We envision the collection containing a mix of established, up-and-coming, and brand new voices, and we welcome questions about proposals-in-process as well. We hope you'll consider submitting something.

Big Ups, Doc

For those of you who may not know, I'm still in my first year at Bowling Green, and when I got here I was assigned the office space just vacated by Andrew Mara when he and Sport made the big move to NDSU. When they moved, though, Andrew kindly left a very nice white board hanging in the office (complete with cleaning agent!), which I have until now used mainly to illustrate grammatical concepts to confused students from my "teaching grammar in context" language arts class.

That just changed. Tonight, there was something about the large scale and the vertical on-the-wallness of that board that helped me finally work through a sticking point in my current research. I've scribbled. I've outlined. I've used MS Word in just about every conceivable way, from freewriting to making bulleted lists to slogging page by page through my argument. But it was the big white board next to my desk that finally helped me see the writing on the wall.

Thanks, Andrew.