Reading :: Unfinished Business

Unfinished Business: Thoughts on the Past, Present, Future, and Nurturing of Homo Scribens

By Charles Bazerman

The link above goes, not to Amazon, but to the WAC Clearinghouse, the open-access publisher that Charles Bazerman has used for his books for years. (I think his first book at WAC Clearinghouse was a collection he coedited with David R. Russell in 2003.) Because he publishes through WAC Clearinghouse, he can distribute his books more quickly and broadly, and readers can read them at no cost. 

I suspect that at the WAC Clearinghouse, he also has a freer hand than he would at a for-profit publisher, where an editor might take a more active role. Such editorial constraints may not appeal to Bazerman at this point: he is newly retired and his recently published works have focused on (a) pulling together the threads of his wide-ranging research and insights and (b) yielding a cohesive overview of their implications for future work. That’s true in his festschrift and his recent autobiography/autoethnography —- and it’s certainly true in Unfinished Business as well, which combines versions of previously published works with unpublished ones. In the Introduction, he explains:

Almost half of these chapters are previously unpublished, either freshly written for this volume (Chapters 1, 2, 6, 9, 19) or transformed from recent conference presentations (Chapters 7, 8, 10). Some have been published in places not usually seen as part of writing studies (Chapters 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18) or only in Spanish translation (Chapter 15). Some, though published and accessible, nonetheless fill in some of the connections among the other essays (Chapters 3, 4, 5, 11). Together, I hope they present how I see writing and its instruction these days. None are the last word, and I rely on some speculative leaps. Yet I hope they intrigue some researchers to pursue questions, seek evidence, or await more definitive knowledge from researchers in other disciplines.

The questions addressed here range from the most fundamental ideas about humans as writers and writing as constituting modern society to the most practical issues of curriculum and teaching. The answers to some may someday become clearer as data are gathered or as the future reveals what will happen. Other questions are less empirical and more about our values and commitments as writing instructors. But they all relate in some way to the purposes, means, skills, situations, and development of writers—and our actions as instructors. In ways more distant or immediate, they all bear on what we do on Mondays. (p.3)

These materials are arranged in five sections, totaling 263 pages:

1. Section I: How evolution produced writing humans and how writing humans remade their world.

2. Section II: Writing and knowledge

3. Section III: Nurturing Homo Scribens: Puzzles of writing instruction

4. Section IV: The ethics and values of writing

5. Section V: Guesses at unknown futures

And within those sections, Bazerman draws on a vast set of materials, many of which he has produced, but many from disciplines as diverse as anthropology, archaeology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, psychology, the rhetoric of science, sociology, and many others. 

If you’re thinking that it might be difficult to keep such a book cohesive — that was my experience as well. Each section represents a broad topic in itself, and even within one section, traveling from one chapter to the next entails encountering different disciplines and literatures. In addition, chapters range widely, with some being densely cited (Chapter 5 cites 34 sources), others thinly so (Chapter 6 cites only two sources). Even though I’m pretty familiar with Bazerman’s works and at least a good chunk of his sources, I sometimes had trouble finding the thread of a consistent argument. Sometimes the chapters felt like different conversations being had by different communities. Here, I think a more active editor could have helped to iron out some of the connections that I suspect are blindingly obvious to Bazerman, but not always clear to readers.

Nevertheless, the chapters in toto provide a grand unifying vision of writing as a uniquely human pursuit that has been explored across a range of disciplines and complexities. In highly literate societies, writing sometimes seems natural — but examined carefully, it is revealed as a complex set of human practices that are rooted in our biological abilities and proclivities, exercised through our material environments, culturally constituted in sometimes ragged layers, constantly practiced and constantly evolving, through subtle and overt conflicts as well as concessions and collaborations. These many chapters help us to explore these different aspects of writing, from its origins in the past to its current applications to its possible futures. If you’re interested in writing, definitely pick up this book. 

Reading :: Engaging Research Communities in Writing Studies

 Engaging Research Communities in Writing Studies: Ethics, Public Policy, and Research Design

by Johanna Phelps

As someone who does field research, I’ve had to write my share of IRB proposals. And as a professor, I have had to mentor many PhD and MA students through the process as well. I even teach the process to my undergraduate students, although they are exempt because their studies are for learning purposes only. The IRB process is often frustrating: not only do institutional requirements sometimes change, the individuals involved in the process often rotate to other assignments, meaning that standards are sometimes implemented differently from semester to semester. Yet the IRB proposal is a vital part of the research process, pushing us to think more deeply about how we can support and benefit our participants rather than just about how we can collect data and write papers based on them.

In this book, Phelps examines how IRBs have impacted writing studies. She overviews the principles that animate IRBs; discusses how IRBs came to be; and goes into detailed exploration of how the IRB process interacts with different kinds of research in writing studies. What emerges is an argument for how IRB compliance can align closely with the field’s focus on justice. 

The book is well worth reading, and it’s also available as an open access download, making it a good fit for graduate and perhaps even advanced undergraduate classes. If you research, teach research, or have to deal with IRBs, it’s definitely worth a look.

Reading :: Rewriting Work

 Rewriting Work

Edited by Lora Anderson

The link above goes to the free download of this collection at the WAC Clearinghouse. The collection itself comprises an introduction and seven chapters focusing on various aspects of workplace writing, particularly understood in terms of how technical and professional communication has changed as a field. 

I’ll just pull out a few chapters that I found interesting.

Chapter 1, “Common Thread, Varied Focus: Defining Workplace in Technical and Professional Communication” (Rosselot-Merritt & Bloch), notes that the term “workplace” has been operationalized and conceptualized in many different ways. If that argument sounds familiar, I made a similar one in Written Communication late last year — we must have been writing our pieces at the same time. I wish I had gotten a chance to read their chapter before finishing mine! Our arguments are different — they’re more interested in surveying different uses of the term, so they provide a metasynthesis of TC scholarship using the term — but I think that this metasynthesis could have helped me to better contextualize my own argument. 

Through the metasynthesis, the authors argue that the TPC understanding of “workplace” has tracked with the field’s different “turns” since the 1980s: humanistic, social, cultural, and social justice. They conclude with their own working definition of “workplace”:

Any context in which communicative practices or activities meeting any of the criteria below can and/or do take place. Those practices or activities

• further a mission or purpose which may be implicit or may be codified in a formal statement (such as a “mission statement”);

• involve an exchange of physical materials, virtual quantities of something, and/or ideas; and

• often, but not always, involve material or financial gain on the part of those conducting the communicative practice or activity or the individuals or organization on whose behalf they are acting. (pp.35-36)

They map the elements of this statement to their corpus. 

In contrast, in Chapter 2, “Emphasizing Place in Workplace Research,” Lisa Melonçon argues that the place aspect has been understudied. She argues that we should examine “micro-contexts—highly localized places where communication can be created and/or be used” (p.47). She describes an ethnographic study of an organization, focusing on specific communication problems to illustrate the importance of these localized places in them. “As these examples show, the physical spaces of the three different ‘offices’ directly impacted the way communication was considered and done. Without thinking through the where, much of the work we did would not have been as successful because of the impact the material places had on work” (p.61).  

Skipping ahead, in Chapter 4, “ Freelancers as a Growing Workplace Norm: Demonstrating Expertise in Unfamiliar Communities of Practice,” Fitzpatrick and McCaughey draw on Communities of Practice (CoP) theory “to identify and explain the unique challenges that organizations and freelance/gig workplace writers face when it comes to onboarding, communication, and enculturation” (p.93). Drawing on two case studies, they argue

that freelancers are often on the outside of such communities as they perform their work, communicating to and with such groups from this outside space. In the context of freelance workplace writers, a community of practice framework allows us to see these temporary workers as they work to demonstrate expertise across tasks, organizations, and industries. (p.97)

They add: “Freelancers serve as kind of itinerant specialists, bouncing from community of practice to community of practice, taking with them each experience, yet not necessarily finding each one wholly applicable to their next temporary homes” (p.106). And they conclude that one way to better understand this movement is by revisiting the literature on transfer.

Other chapters in the collection also do important work, but these were the most relevant to my interests. If, like me, you’re interested in workplace writing, certainly consider picking this collection up.

Reading :: Dialogue in Focus Groups

 Dialogue in Focus Groups: Exploring Socially Shared Knowledge

By Ivana Markova, Per Lindell, Michele Grossen, and Anne Salazar Orvig

“This book is neither a manual telling the reader what to do at various stages of work, nor is it a methodological guide answering practical questions,” the authors tell us at the beginning of Ch.2 (p.31).  By Chapter 2, I had figured this fact out — but I can understand why they had to tell us this, since the title and cover really do make it look like a textbook on focus groups. 

If it’s not a textbook or a guide, then, what is it? Drawing on dialogism, the authors argue that understanding small-group dynamics is critical to doing focus group research. This point, they say, is often lost on researchers who conduct focus groups, researchers who conceive of focus groups as a way to get answers out of collections of individuals. Rather, focus groups generate socially shared knowledge; we can focus on “the ways people generate heterogeneous meanings in the group dynamics” (p.2). 

Before getting into what that entails, let’s jump back to Chapter 1, where the authors stake out dialogism in the Bakhtinian tradition (p.8). In this tradition, the limits of the self are always in relation to the other, and understanding is always evaluative (p.8). Noting developmental psychology research that suggests that children are born with a predisposition to intersubjectivity, they relate dialogism to Lewin’s field theory, in which a group is understood as being interdependent and dynamic (p.12). 

Lewis is invoked again in Chapter 2, understood as the founder of the study of small-group dynamics (p.38). Given the fact of small-group dynamics, the authors provide “four main assumptions on which analytical tools should be based if we want them to be congruent with a dialogical approach to focus groups” (p.48):

1. “Considering focus group discussions as group discussions”: The authors recognize that focus groups create an outer framing (an orientation to some topic) and an inner framing (a context specific to the group), and the interplay between these two framings “gives way to specific communicative activity types that need to be analysed in themselves” (p.48). 

2. “Considering the subject’s heterogeneity”: They note that each individual is heterogeneous — they can have different social identities and they may speak from various positions (p.49).

3. ”Considering a focus-group discussion as circulation of ideas”: Discourse in the focus group may respond to other focus group members, but it may also respond to antecedent discourse from elsewhere. Analysts must not just account for what is said, but also how, for whom, and in what communicative activity types (p.49).

4. ”Considering a focus-group discussion as a situated activity which relies on historically and culturally shared social knowledge”: They more or less argue that we can’t understand focus-group discussion either as just here-and-now or as reflecting socially fixed preexisting positions (p.49). 

With these principles in mind, the authors go on to examine focus groups that they conducted individually or in pairs. And here, dear reader, I remembered why I don’t conduct discourse analyses. The data and analysis become very granular. So I admit that I ended up skimming most of the rest of the book. 

No matter. The first two chapters gave me a great deal to think about, both theoretically and methodologically. If you also think about focus groups, social dynamics, and dialogism, I highly recommend the book.  

Reading :: After Lockdown

 After Lockdown: A Metamorphosis

By Bruno Latour

Bruno Latour has long been one of my favorite academic authors. I fell in love with his exuberant writing style in books such as Laboratory Life, Science in Action, and Aramis. Even more so, I really enjoyed his contrarian takes on controversies, particularly as they came out in his field research. For instance, in following around researchers at the Salk Laboratory, Latour watched what they did rather than simply following what they said, and these observations led him to argue that science is not necessarily done by geniuses, but by technicians who set up chains of re-representations in order to make arguments using longer and stronger networks of actants. His fieldwork, in fact, is much more interesting to me than his purely conceptual or theoretical works such as We Have Never Been Modern.

Latour retired in 2017 and passed away in 2022 of pancreatic cancer. His last fieldwork book (The Making of Law) was published in English in 2010; his books since then have been conceptual and theoretical, and largely focused on ecology and the question of how we are to live in the world. After Lockdown (2021) is in this vein. It’s not his last book — looking at Wikipedia, it looks like he published a coauthored book in 2022 and a set of interviews with Nicolas Turong in 2024 (neither of which I have read.)

So how is After Lockdown? In a word: underwhelming. Like his previous two works on climate change, Down to Earth and Facing Gaia, this one pulls out some of Latour’s well-work author’s tricks, tricks that seemed so fresh in the 1980s but that have become threadbare. He uses a controlling metaphor throughout the book, that of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. He sets up dichotomies (natural and artificial, pp.20-21; map and territory, p.72), only to pull out the rug from under them. He assembles people into two camps, then represents them as differing reactions to the same underlying reality (in We Have Never Been Modern, it was the modernists and postmodernists; here, it’s Extinction Rebellion and Great Replacement theory, p.39). Ah, and networks get a look in: COVID lockdowns, he says, exposed the networks that keep us alive (p.35). Finally, just as Latour famously and daringly suggested that we have a ten-year moratorium on cognitive explanations, here he challenges us to stop saying that things have an “economic dimension” (p.62).

And what is the central lesson of After Lockdown? Latour essentially argues that we will have to reorient our lives and localize ourselves differently, because nothing has been left untouched after lockdown. If that seems like a revelation to you, certainly you should pick up this book. 

For me, however, this book really felt like Latour himself had run out of steam. He still manages to write both allusively and clearly — quite a gift — but his declarations do not seem revelatory, instead retreading points that he made in the halcyon 1980s and 1990s.