Shimmering Literacies – Bronwyn T. Williams

As I write this sitting in England, I know that back at the University of Louisville they are getting ready for the last day of the University Writing Center’s annual Dissertation Writing Retreat. All week a dozen Ph.D. students from different disciplines across the University, have been coming to the Writing Center each day for a day full of writing, individual consultations, and mini-workshops about dissertation writing. It’s a week that is a great benefit both to the writers and to the consultants and staff. Blog entries both from the Writing Center blog from this year and from last year here (as well as some entries of my own from last year, here and here) give you some flavor of the event and the impact it has on everyone involved. While I have had a fantastic spring being on a leave where I have been able to focus on research, I do miss the much about the work and the community in the Writing Center – and in particular the community, productivity, and satisfaction that takes place at the Dissertation Writing Retreat.

The importance of the Dissertation Writing Retreat for offering a space for graduate students to not only work on their writing, but to engage in conversations about the conventions, craft, and processes of scholarly writing, is all the more vivid to me given the conversations I have had with graduate students here. While there is no doubt that the graduate students I have met with here, at a number of different universities, are getting support and feedback from their dissertation directors, it is also clear that, for most of them, there is not the additional support for writing that we offer back at the UofL Writing Center. Of course it is essential to learn about research methods and ethics and to have guidance about the content and analysis of a dissertation. Yet it is equally important to remember that writing in a new genre – and a dissertation-length work is always a new genre – must be learned. Such learning comes from explicit conversations about genre conventions, from feedback that focuses on rhetorical concerns, and from attention to the processes of writing and revision for scholarly research writing. The UofL Writing Center – like many writing centers – offers that kind of response. And even if a dissertation director is offering good, rhetorically focused writing response, just having another set of eyes on a writing project is always helpful. (One of the students I am currently directing is taking part in this year’s retreat and I am delighted that she is having another person to offer thoughtful responses to her writing.) Offering thoughtful and constructive response and criticism is something we do at the Writing Center every day, for all members of the University community, not just at the Dissertation Writing Retreat. There are only a few writing centers (or writing centres) at British universities (though some, as at the University of Coventry are doing excellent work). And too often here, as in the U.S., Writing Centers are thought of as having only a remedial mission, rather than serving writers at all levels, for all purposes. I am grateful to the staff at the UofL Writing Center – Adam Robinson, Ashly Bender, Nancy Bou Ayash, Jennifer Marciniak, Tika Lamsal, Barrie Olson, and Matt Wiles – as well as all the participants, for making this year’s retreat such a success and for proving, once again, the value of good writing response for all writers. I miss being there and wish you luck with the final day of writing.

When I came to England in January for my Fulbright Fellowship I expected to blogging a lot this spring. If there was ever a time that I would be writing about what was going on with research and my experiences, this would be it.

That was January.

Now, as I sit here in my kitchen in Bakewell in May, windows open for the first time this spring, I am surprised that not only didn’t I write more here, I haven’t written at all. Baffling. It’s not as if I haven’t been writing, or reading, meeting amazing people, or thinking. In fact it has been a hugely productive spring in terms of sorting through new ideas, having great conversations, doing new research, doing a bunch of guest presentations, even having fun. And I guess that’s it. It’s not that I’ve been busy in the stressed-out sense of things. But I have been working through new ideas, doing tons of preliminary, informal, messy writing, and reading, reading, reading. And the blog just didn’t fit easily into that work – at least this spring. Clearly still sorting out how I can best use this space.

With warmer weather, though, I feel the urge to get back on here. So expect to see me sorting through – slowly – the ideas that have been bouncing around all spring – agency, technology, emotion, control, transformation, crossing-cultures, and so on. Funny thing, writing.

One way to experience the embodiment of the saying, “If you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” is to get a bunch of academics from different fields together and set them talking. I just spend four days at the UK Fulbright Forum at the Universities of Bristol and Cardiff. About fifty scholars and post-graduate students were thrown together for lectures, presentations, a bit of tourism, and a fair amount of eating and drinking.

While there were highlights of the formal program – lectures on Welsh language, history, and politics from Sioned Davies, Bill Jones, and Richard Wyn Jones about which I’ll write more another time – what I’m pondering today are the informal conversations that took place during the week. The participants at the forum, Fulbright recipients working in the UK – came from fields as varied as education, political science, medicine, biology, art, history, literature – and me. As we would chat over breakfast in the morning or drinks at night, there was a typical pattern to many of the conversations. Each person would describe his or her research, and that would be followed by the other person attempting to find a context for that project in her or is work. Blame it on terministic screens, disciplinary enthusiasm, or human nature, we tended to try to locate the work of others’ into our own fields, our own interests. A more positive interpretation of the interactions is that we wanted to find points of intellectual and human connection.

The conversations reminded me of two things. First, the concerns of literacy are trans-disciplinary. I found myself finding connections to literacy theory and practices from the neuroscientist studying language and music, the urban planner studying transportation and behavior, or the digital media artist studying identity. It was a reminder that getting outside the readings and conversation in a field can reveal to us new insights and implications for how humans use sign systems to create and interpret texts. Sometimes these connections are direct and explicit. Sometimes I just felt I was finding possible new metaphors to help me rethink my ways of conceiving reading and writing. In fact, getting outside of a field is good for all of us, but for me, I kept coming across ideas with implications for literacy time and again.

I was also reminded of how little other academics outside of our field know about literacy and composition studies. Concepts that are a given for those in our field – literacy as a social practice or genre as an evolving rhetorical concern – are still news, and sometimes even intriguing news, to others. Of course this is the case with any field when you encounter someone new, with new knowledge. That said, it is the case that writing and literacy shape and concern all academics – in their research and their teaching. So a reminder that, another benefit of talking beyond my field is the work I can do in helping others to a more nuanced concept of writing and reading, was welcome. For all of us at the forum, we probably still remained disciplinary hammers when we left, but perhaps we were slightly more able to ponder and engage with the uses of other tools.