Day one at the watson

[Deborah Brandt]

Hello Everyone,

I had the privilege of reading all paper and digital posts. My hope to provide a cogent summary melted in the richness of the observations. I hope those who did not get to ask questions at the session will find informal opportunities to do so.

I want to lift up preterit's post (with some revision) as a good running question for the conference and one we could start with at Saturday closing session.

What have we come to understand as economies of writing perspectives and do they provide anything new?

Also, taking all comments together, here is what we seemed to be working on today:

We are thinking about relationships between work and reward in writing, language learning and research. We are noticing that there is not equal reward for equal work when it comes to these.

We are seeing the value of international and multilingual/modal perspectives and wondering how to maintain them. We see how terms change when their locus of enunciation changes or their mediums shift.

We are noticing that discourses are rich and endowed but that the writers we know best are often disenfranchised. I for one am struck by this paradox.

We are worrying about method and many want more talk on this. (another topic for Saturday perhaps).

We are trying to apply things we hear to our situations but are not sure where to start.

We want more clarification of the problems behind some of the proposals we heard today.

Looking forward to tomorrow. Thanks again for all your efforts today.

[watson56]

What struck me today is a question implied by many of the keynotes and concurrents which I formulate as "What would it mean to value students' writing how and where we find it?" A related question is how might we guide students so that they can communicate their ideas to others in their own registers? This implies, to me, a question of agency--how can we overcome the resistance from power to the diversification of English. I have to admit,I teach a graduate course in Chaucer, so likely I am rather naive in my thought that we can get past the obsession with ONE TRUE English.

[preterite]

I'm grateful to have attention called to my question about how focusing our concerns at this conference on the concept of economy differs from what composition studies usually does. I'll expand a little bit: in much of the discourse in the JAC special issue and that I've heard yesterday and today, economy as a term is almost always invoked as (1) a metaphor for something non-economic, most often a system of circulation or exchange, or (2) the monolithic and homogenous body of capitalism's abstracted market forces that has slipped its discursive bonds and lies beyond human intervention and so must be responded to in some other sphere (cultural, social, political, etc.) because of its existence as "a force to be reckoned with outside of politics and society, located both above as a mystical abstraction, and below as the grounded bottom line" (J. K. Gibson-Graham). Both of those senses result in a rhetorical move that turns us toward the idea of economy only to immediately turn away to some other domain, and thereby construct the economy itself as beyond our intervention; as something upon which rhetoricians and compositionists can have no possible effect. I would like to resist such a construction.