Journal 9

What is the writer trying to find out more about through their research (what research question guides her work)?
The writer is trying to find the resistance, contradictions, and conflicts in writing to reveal the ways that motivation and individual identity can shape the writing that participants do. She uses the question; “What might studying writers’ self-representations of that process reveal to us in terms of genres and activity systems?”

How does this author collect the data she needs to answer her question?
To examine self-representation across the genres of an activity system, Powell studied the wide range of genre systems at a small, private, Catholic-affiliated college, using the college as a whole as the unit of analysis.

What sort of genres do you see your peers using as forms of “self-representation”? Whenever conflict or tension arises within an activity system, genres serve as coping tools. Powell states “In the same way that genre functions as a tool for mediating the goals of participants within an activity system, self-representation functions as a “sub-tool”, that is, a tool operating within the tool of genre, for mediating the discourses of identity and the discourses of power”.