Girl Talk Tales, Causal Models, and the Dissertation: Exploring the Topical Contours of Context in Sociology Talk and Text

Since the early 1980s, composition studies has arrived at a broad consensus that it is important to understand how social contexts relate to the cognitive processes and individual behaviors involved in writing and reading texts, although within this broad consensus are various notions of context and of how contexts relate to processes and texts. Drawing on both structuralist and everyday accounts of discourse and society, composition theory and research have generally conceptualized the contexts of writing in terms of abstract, unified constructs. Whether defined globally (culture, language, history, discourse community, genre, ideological state apparatus) or locally (institutional setting, communicative situation, task demand), context has typically been construed as a static, unified given, something that both frames and governs literate activity. Sociohistoric theories question such unified constructs, viewing discourse as the concrete, historical, socially mediated actions of individuals (e.g., Bakhtin, Dialogic and Speech Genres; Becker; Duranti and Goodwin; Lave and Wenger; Lemke; Tannen; Vygotsky; Wertsch). In these approaches to discourse, contexts are dynamic, dialogic, negotiable constructs that participants achieve in interaction by drawing on socially-sedimented and emergent resources. Instead of asking what is the context of a particular communicative action, sociohistoric approaches would ask: 1) What are the practices through which contexts are nominated, displayed, ratified, and contested by particular participants in interaction? 2) How does the emergent situated action of the moment articulate with past and future chains of events, chains which are, in effect, streams of microand macro-histories? How contexts are conceptualized and studied is a key issue in composition studies, particularly in understanding the complex relationships Girl Talk Tales, Causal Models, and the Dissertation: Exploring the Topical Contours of Context in Sociology Talk and Text