Accounting for Place in Composition Studies

When the fields our students wish to enter are place-based, or when their writing challenges are connected to negotiations between home dialects and SAE, we Appalachian compositionalists have frameworks for addressing that. But place also matters in other contexts – when students come to a suburburan-rural ecotone from the city, or to the United States from another country. Considering place in the Appalachian classroom is not just an Appalachian issue. So while theorizing about how writing works in particular places risks being both overly essential and overly provincial, such research is still just as necessary as any research about race, gender, or class; primarily because place is intersectionally linked to all of these aspects of identity. Yet while much research in Composition Studies considers how identity plays out in the classroom, less exists which connects identity to place, which talks about it means to write as a Brooklynite facing gentrification, or an Appalachian displaced from home for economic or environmental reasons, or which deals with the many issues facing immigrant and refugee and transnational writers. These conversations exist on their own within other disciplines, and within Composition Studies subsumed under broader discussions of race, class, and gender. Less often are these factors, however, privileged within studies in the discipline. This discussion attempts to tease out those nascent conversations to form a working theory of place in Composition, both Appalachian places and places beyond