While plagiarism is often viewed in terms of ethical binaries, scholars in composition studies have recognized plagiarism as part of literacy practices governing identity construction. In this light, what is at stake is how writers construct identity by positioning stance-claims according to the standards of respective discourse communities. For…

In this essay Maureen Ford examines a selection of situated knowledges discourses in order to make explicit their attention to political effects. She contends, first, that the "epistemic public(s)" constituted through these discourses are multiple, interactive, performative, and layered, and further that they are explicitly political in ways that…

Raymond William's historical analysis of the "community" and the "individual" is useful for looking critically at the notion of "discourse communities." Recent "social" theories of writing have invoked the idea of community in ways that seem at once sweeping and vague, for they fail to state the operating…

Academic criticism is defined in this paper as a statement which reflects a discrepancy between the stance of a researcher/author, on the one hand, and that of another researcher or the discourse community as a whole, on the other (Salager-Meyer & Alcaraz Ariza, 2003). Despite researchers' awareness of the potential difficulty academic criticism…

The current public debate between the images of the smiling war hero and of the grimacing Vietnam veteran provide opportunities to define two discourse communities that manifest themselves in students' written discourse. These can be seen as akin to the first American jeremiads, which were Puritan treatises written by seventeenth century religious…