Keywords In Writing Studies

Keywords in Writing Studies is an exploration of the principal ideas and ideals of an emerging academic field as they are constituted by its specialized vocabulary. A sequel to the 1996 work Keywords in Composition Studies, this new volume traces the evolution of the field’s lexicon, taking into account the wide variety of theoretical, educational, professional, and institutional developments that have redefined it over the past two decades. Contributors address the development, transformation, and interconnections among thirty-six of the most critical terms that make up writing studies. Looking beyond basic definitions or explanations, they explore the multiple layers of meaning within the terms that writing scholars currently use, exchange, and question. Each term featured is a part of the general disciplinary parlance, and each is a highly contested focal point of significant debates about matters of power, identity, and values. Each essay begins with the assumption that its central term is important precisely because its meaning is open and multiplex. Keywords in Writing Studies reveals how the key concepts in the field are used and even challenged, rather than advocating particular usages and the particular vision of the field that they imply. The volume will be of great interest to both graduate students and established scholars.

Keywords for Travel Writing Studies draws on the notion of the ‘keyword’ as initially elaborated by Raymond Williams in his seminal 1976 text Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society to present 100 concepts central to the study of travel writing as a literary form. Each entry in the volume is around 1,000 words, the style more essayistic than encyclopaedic, with contributors reflecting on their chosen keyword from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. The emphasis on travelogues and other cultural representations of mobility drawn from a range of national and linguistic traditions ensures that the volume has a comparative dimension; the aim is to give an overview of each term in its historical and theoretical complexity, providing readers with a clear sense of how the selected words are essential to a critical understanding of travel writing. Each entry is complemented by an annotated bibliography of five essential items suggesting further reading.

Keywords in Composition Studies is the first systematic inquiry into the vocabulary of writing teachers and theorists. In brief yet heavily researched essays, contributors explore the development of and interconnections among fifty-five of the most consequential words in the field. It is with these critical terms that the contemporary field of composition has been composed, and in this sense, Keywords in Composition Studies is an introduction to the principal ideas and ideals of compositionists. Yet this book is neither a dictionary nor an encyclopedia; it does not attempt to capture the established knowledge of a unified discipline through its vocabulary but rather explores the multiple layers of meaning inhabiting the words writing teachers and theorists have depended and continue to depend on most. Each essay begins with the assumption that its central term is important precisely because its meaning is open, overdetermined. The purpose of each essay is to foreground a range of meaning signified by its central term rather than to pinpoint a meaning. In this sense, Keywords in Composition Studies is a practical model for reading the texts of an expanding and unsettled field.

The latest vocabulary of key terms in American Studies Since its initial publication, scholars and students alike have turned to Keywords for American Cultural Studies as an invaluable resource for understanding key terms and debates in the fields of American studies and cultural studies. As scholarship has continued to evolve, this revised and expanded second edition offers indispensable meditations on new and developing concepts used in American studies, cultural studies, and beyond. It is equally useful for college students who are trying to understand what their teachers are talking about, for general readers who want to know what’s new in scholarly research, and for professors who just want to keep up. Designed as a print-digital hybrid publication, Keywords collects more than 90 essays30 of which are new to this edition—from interdisciplinary scholars, each on a single term such as “America,” “culture,” “law,” and “religion.” Alongside “community,” “prison,” "queer," “region,” and many others, these words are the nodal points in many of today’s most dynamic and vexed discussions of political and social life, both inside and outside of the academy. The Keywords website, which features 33 essays, provides pedagogical tools that engage the entirety of the book, both in print and online. The publication brings together essays by scholars working in literary studies and political economy, cultural anthropology and ethnic studies, African American history and performance studies, gender studies and political theory. Some entries are explicitly argumentative; others are more descriptive. All are clear, challenging, and critically engaged. As a whole, Keywords for American Cultural Studies provides an accessible A-to-Z survey of prevailing academic buzzwords and a flexible tool for carving out new areas of inquiry.

Wendy Bishop and David Starkey have created a remarkable resource volume for creative writing students and other writers just getting started. In two- to ten-page discussions, these authors introduce forty-one central concepts in the fields of creative writing and writing instruction, with discussions that are accessible yet grounded in scholarship and years of experience. Keywords in Creative Writing provides a brief but comprehensive introduction to the field of creative writing through its landmark terms, exploring concerns as abstract as postmodernism and identity politics alongside very practical interests of beginning writers, like contests, agents, and royalties. This approach makes the book ideal for the college classroom as well as the writer’s bookshelf, and unique in the field, combining the pragmatic accessibility of popular writer’s handbooks, with a wider, more scholarly vision of theory and research.

49 original essays on the essential terms and concepts in children's literature

Naming What We Know examines the core principles of knowledge in the discipline of writing studies using the lens of “threshold concepts”—concepts that are critical for epistemological participation in a discipline. The first part of the book defines and describes thirty-seven threshold concepts of the discipline in entries written by some of the field’s most active researchers and teachers, all of whom participated in a collaborative wiki discussion guided by the editors. These entries are clear and accessible, written for an audience of writing scholars, students, and colleagues in other disciplines and policy makers outside the academy. Contributors describe the conceptual background of the field and the principles that run throughout practice, whether in research, teaching, assessment, or public work around writing. Chapters in the second part of the book describe the benefits and challenges of using threshold concepts in specific sites—first-year writing programs, WAC/WID programs, writing centers, writing majors—and for professional development to present this framework in action. Naming What We Know opens a dialogue about the concepts that writing scholars and teachers agree are critical and about why those concepts should and do matter to people outside the field.

Introduces key terms, quantitative and qualitative research, debates, and histories for Environmental and Nature Studies Understandings of “nature” have expanded and changed, but the word has not lost importance at any level of discourse: it continues to hold a key place in conversations surrounding thought, ethics, and aesthetics. Nowhere is this more evident than in the interdisciplinary field of environmental studies. Keywords for Environmental Studies analyzes the central terms and debates currently structuring the most exciting research in and across environmental studies, including the environmental humanities, environmental social sciences, sustainability sciences, and the sciences of nature. Sixty essays from humanists, social scientists, and scientists, each written about a single term, reveal the broad range of quantitative and qualitative approaches critical to the state of the field today. From “ecotourism” to “ecoterrorism,” from “genome” to “species,” this accessible volume illustrates the ways in which scholars are collaborating across disciplinary boundaries to reach shared understandings of key issues—such as extreme weather events or increasing global environmental inequities—in order to facilitate the pursuit of broad collective goals and actions. This book underscores the crucial realization that every discipline has a stake in the central environmental questions of our time, and that interdisciplinary conversations not only enhance, but are requisite to environmental studies today. Visit keywords.nyupress.org for online essays, teaching resources, and more.

Covers four inter-related subject areas: news and journalism theories, practices, environments and technologies. Different genres of reporting are covered such as business, crime, environmental, fashion, lifestyle, investigative, science, sports and war journalism.

This book brings together Latinx scholars in Rhetoric and Composition to discuss keywords that have been misused or appropriated by forces working against the interests of minority students. For example, in educational and political forums, rhetorics of identity and civil rights have been used to justify ideas and policies that reaffirm the myth of a normative US culture that is white, Eurocentric, and monolinguistically English. Such attempts amount to a project of neo-colonization, if we understand colonization to mean not only the taking of land but also the taking of culture, of which language is a crucial part. The editors introduce the concept of epistemic delinking and argue for its use in conceptualizing a kind of rhetorical and discursive decolonization, and contributors offer examples of this decolonization in action through detailed work on specific terms. Specifically, they draw on their training in rhetoric and on their own experiences as people of color to help reset the field's agenda. They also theorize new keywords to shed light on the great varieties of Latinx writing, rhetoric, and literacies that continue to emerge and circulate in the culture at large, in the hope that the field will feel more urgently the need to recognize, theorize, and teach the intersections of writing, pedagogy, and politics.