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3 r E m a p p i n g p r o f E s s i o n a l w r i t i n g Articulating the State of the Art and Composition Studies Tim Peeples and Bill Hart-Davidson In 1993, Patricia A. Sullivan and James E. Porter published “Remapping Curricular Geography: Professional Writing in/and English” in the Journal of Business and Technical Communication. In 2007, when Thomas Kent was asked by Dorothy Winsor, then the editor of JBTC, to identify the most significant article published during his tenure as editor of that same journal, he selected “Remapping.” Kent argues that the Sullivan and Porter article “remains timely in disciplinary and institutional terms,” and “the thrust of their argument clearly continues to resonate with us” (12). Primary among these resonating arguments, Kent singles out two. First is the clear and persuasive evidence that in 1993 professional writing constituted an “emerging” independent field of study and research; by 2007, Kent asserts confidently that professional writing had moved from the status of “emerging” to become a fully “established” field of its own. Second is the persuasive argument that we think about and understand disciplines in general and professional writing specifically in terms of the spaces or geography they occupy and their associated spatial or geographical relationships: Sullivan and Porter invited us to think differently about the nature of curricular space within our academic disciplines. By providing an alternative vocabulary —saturated and infused with the metaphor of curricular geography—to describe the allocation of disciplinary space, Sullivan and Porter asked us to reconceptualize the formation of our academic disciplines. Instead of understanding a discipline as a subdivided formation of relatively autonomous fields within fields . . . they suggested that we might be better served by understanding a discipline as being a confederation of epistemological paradigms that shift, float, and even intermingle relative to one another. (13) In addition to reframing ways we think about and understand disciplines , and professional writing in particular, “Remapping” makes clear Remapping Professional Writing 53 that disciplinary spaces/geographies are constructs, created over time and dynamically readjusted through contestations about the nature and function of spaces and relations. (14) In their article, Sullivan and Porter recontest the space of professional writing by exploring various geographical rearticulations of that space relative to English. This chapter participates in the ongoing (re)construction of professional writing, recontesting the space of the field, with a focus on its relation to and with composition studies.1 Rather than pretend to comprehensively frame the state of the art in professional writing, we (1) return to some of the arguments made in “Remapping” to rearticulate Sullivan and Porter’s set of competing spatial constructions of professional writing in relation to related fields, primarily composition studies ; (2) examine a few locations within the field that suggest some of the primary geographies and spatial relations demarcating the field; (3) identify spaces of inquiry that most closely connect professional writing and composition studies; and (4) identify other spaces of inquiry that are more exclusively associated with professional writing and more significantly articulated with other fields but are key to any mapping of the state of the art in professional writing. As a result of this work, we aim to achieve the goals set out for each of the chapters within this collection: to define a specific area of scholarship (e.g., professional writing) as it relates to composition studies and in terms of its current state of the art, and to do so in ways that highlight key characteristics of the specific field of focus. m ap p i ng p ro fEssi o nal wri t i ng and Co m p o si t i o n st udi Es In “Remapping,” Sullivan and Porter begin with a definition of professional writing that asserts multiple identities. At once, professional writing is understood (1) as a research field, focused primarily on investigating writing in workplaces; (2) as a workplace activity, as in writing 1. Though Sullivan and Porter use “rhetoric/composition” in their own mappings, we are using the phrase “composition studies,” in great measure because that term resonates with this collection. This exchange of terms, however, is not without its dangers. “Rhetoric and composition,” “composition studies,” “writing studies,” and “rhetoric and writing studies” are some of the terms used to define a field of related interests. However, these various terms reflect a range of divergent disciplinary geographies and have, in some instances, been...

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