Accessing Genre/Genre as Access

Abstract

This dissertation project asks: How does writing shape access to particular actions, communities, and/or settings? The author adapts a framework for exploring the relationship between writing and access by synthesizing Rhetorical Genre Studies, which sees writing as patterned communicative actions in context, and Network Gatekeeping Theory, which offers a terminology to study the control and power over information or of people as they move through “gates” within a network (Barzilai-Nahon). This framework is then developed into a theory of genre and access through a four-month ethnography of three “genre networks,” a methodology that places a written genre as a node to then centrifugally trace actors, tools, and/or events that are involved or implicated in the genre’s social action across and between site boundaries. These three genre networks—Activity Guides, Master Plans, and Staff Reports—generally exist across a local government and its Parks and Recreation Department. Findings from these three genre networks allow the author to develop and articulate the various factors that shape the relationship between writing and access, including the who (the gated and gatekeeper), the what (gatekeeping processes), the how (gatekeeping mechanisms), and the why (gatekeeping rationales). Ultimately, this theory of genre and access allows writing researchers to untangle the relationship between writing and access across contexts so they can collaborate toward interventions or innovations that might increase access.