Join the English Department for a hybrid lecture by Watson Scholar Dr. Xiqiao Wang (Pittsburgh).

Abstract: 

Drawing on ideas developed by scholars in science, ecology, and philosophy (Barad, 2007; Haraway, 2016), particularly fungi studies (Tsing, 2015; Sheldrake, 2020), this presentation offers one way in which writing researchers could resort to entanglement as a theoretical metaphor for studying and theorizing writing as unfolding through writers’ shifting associations with natural, cultural, and literate beings and environs, writing and digital tools, semiotic repertoires, and spacetime configurations. With an eye towards the need to grapple with surprises, messiness, accidents, and unpredictable encounters resulting from the writer becoming with multiple life worlds with interanimating temporal and spatial rhythms, I analyze ethnographic data of one writer’s multilingual and multimodal composing process to explore the implications of placing indeterminacy at the center of writing research. In my presentation, I learn to theoretically notice and methodologically attend to unpredictable encounters, unintended detours, surprising discoveries, and (un)calculated risk-taking as important dimensions of the multilingual writer’s effort to compose a Learning Memoir essay for his first-year writing class. I then explore how efforts to theorize the messy, ephemeral, and fluid dimension of writing lead to important discoveries of “strategic silence,” manifested in seemingly idiosyncratic decisions to silence certain life experiences, erase digital footprints, and perform self-censorship, as the outcome of converging individual, interactional, familial, and national histories, which forged intended and unexpected coordination across space-time configurations to inform the writer’s literacy practices.