27 years ago I started studying connections between writing and disciplinary enculturation in graduate seminars. I had a sense that participating in disciplines was more complex than it was being portrayed at the time, that researchers could not simply read academic needs off of the assignments students were given or the genres that they were asked to produce, that disciplines were messier, more social, more human basically, not antiseptic, coolly rational spaces of knowledge and language.

And yet, when I began pilot studies for my dissertation, my first critical hunch was that the real tasks of a seminar could be found in the uptake of the professor (in the writing that he or she actually accepted and valued). I was imagining disciplinary enculturation as something that happened inside the borders of a class, was imagining the professor as the participant with the final word. Instead, my research found life kept mixing into the classroom and students were pursuing their own goals and projects as well as trying to align with the professor's.

Over the next several years, I realized how much the idea of discourse communities, grounded in neo-Platonic images and fueled by powerful tropes and narratives, was shaping not only my own first takes on research, but the research, theory, and teaching of many others.

In my 1998 book Writing/Disciplinarity, I articulated this critique theoretically, methodologically, and empirically. I was confident, given many other critiques at the time and alternative formulations, like Lave and Wenger's communities of practice, that discourse community approaches were being eclipsed. Even prominent proponents like John Swales had suggested it might be time to retire the concept of discourse communities.

But in 2003, I found myself giving a paper at the AAAL conference in which I was trying to account not only for the continued vitality of the notion of discourse communities but also for why so many apparent alternatives (big D Discourses a la Gee, activity systems a la Engestrom, as well as communities of practice) seemed to simply end up rebranding the same basic architecture for commonality and difference.

And now in 2017, I find myself still arguing against discourse community theory, now re-branded as "disciplinary literacies" and widely promoted as key to Common Core standards for k-12 education in the US.

My core argument is that writing and disciplinary enculturation are matters of complex, embodied human becoming, that when we reduce them to neatly transmissible knowledge and skill we obscure their true nature—mystification that does not serve our understanding or our pedagogies, however well it plays with dominant ideologies of knowledge, power, and expertise.