The Writingworld: Hegemonic Writing Doxa vs. Organic Literacies

• In Event: The Writingworld: Power Dynamics in Language, Literacies, and Pedagogies Across Contexts

Abstract

This first presentation of the panel introduces the concept of the Writingworld as the theoretical framework that informs the rest of the presentations in the symposium. Inspired by Danto’s (1964) Institutional Theory of Art, the presenter discusses the Writingworld as an institutional theory of writing that can illustrate how minoritized populations’ literacy practices and events are scrutinized by gatekeepers (such as institutions, associations, professions, assessors, teachers, and publishers) typically from the dominant racial and linguistic populations. The concept helps us illustrate when immigrants and refugees adopt their hosts’ language to write in, they not only borrow linguistic and rhetorical features of the language, but they also need to navigate the cultural norms that regulate the relations of the humans who are involved in construction, dissemination, evaluation, and consumption of written texts.

Unpacking the theory of the Writingworld, the presenter draws on Bourdieu’s field theory (1984, 1988, 1996, 2000) to show that to understand the act of writing, it is not sufficient to only study written texts. We also need to make sense of the social nature of textual production and consumption: “Bourdieu argued that in order to ... explain an event or social phenomenon, it was insufficient to look at what was said [or, in our case, written]… . It was necessary to examine the social space in which interactions, transactions and events occurred” (Thomson, 2012, p. 65). Bourdieu calls this “social space” a field, where people come together to interact based on their habitus and social capital. The relations among the humans in a field are organized by certain doxa, or rules that regulate social fields such as the Writingworld. This presentation uses the concept of doxa to illustrate the hidden cultural manners that regulate the ecology of English writing when imagined as a social field with human actors whose perceptions, decisions, and interactions impact the formation of textual products and, more broadly, literacy practices.

Author

• Amir Kalan, McGill University