The Expanding Universe of Writing Studies : Higher Education Writing Research

Abstract

This edited collection arrives at a crucial moment in the evolution of Writing Studies research. It brings together well-known and emerging scholars in the field of Writing Studies, broadly defined, to explore the range of research methods and methodologies, the types of research questions asked, and the types of data in play in research about higher education writing in the 21st century. Its contribution is unique in the current landscape—a collection of carefully detailed descriptions of the research methods that constitute the field today, after fifty years of development—as marked by the 50th anniversary of the 1966 Dartmouth Seminar. The chapters focus on writing and writers in higher education, foregrounding research questions, methods, and data, while defining the areas of research that constitute this interdisciplinary field and offering examples of studies that employ the methods in these areas. Initial chapters address broad questions: the state of the field today, with a special focus on the field’s methods and their (inter)disciplinary history. Contributions then cover domains such as sociological ethnography, cultural-historical activity theory, linguistics, decolonial translation, cognitive science, corpus linguistics in the study of writing in university first year and upper-level contexts, recurring features in writing across academic contexts, work from psychologists studying college writers’ neuroplasticity, and many other domains of writing research. The final chapter argues for the value of lifespan writing research as an emerging domain, while the conclusion presents a synthesis of the major themes of the collection from leading scholars in the field.