Postsecondary Writing Studies in Hispanic Latin America: Intertextual Dynamics and Intellectual Influence.

As texts enact historically situated ways of making knowledge, intertextual analysis through citation patterns can shed some light on a community’s epistemologies. The present research seeks a deeper understanding of the theoretical trends, the influences, and the emerging disciplinary configuration of the writing studies community in Latin America. Findings confirm the existence of an extremely diverse theoretical landscape, with a strong influence of Englishspeaking authors, followed by locals. A network analysis model for co-cited authors reveals two well-differentiated approaches. This kind of analysis constitutes a useful input to further the discussion about disciplinary epistemologies and ideologies of the field in the region.


Introduction
Postsecondary reading and writing studies have developed in Latin America for at least three decades. Many milestones reveal its institutionalization during that time. A first, indirect, antecedent might be found in the movements of educational reform in Latin America in the 1990s, which flourished first in relation to school curricula, and later expanded their scope to higher education, promoting a change in education philosophies and seeking to develop the agency of students in their own learning processes across the region (Brunner and Ferrada, 2011). In some countries, political agendas of democratization, global integration, and participation were behind these movements, furthering reforms and reconfiguring research and practices.
A second, more direct, antecedent for the emergence of the field corresponds to the deficit discourses -that is, the view that students cannot write -that usually come with processes of expansion in higher education (Russell, 2002;Lillis and Scott, 2007). A dramatic increase in access to universities has occurred in the last three decades in Latin America and the Caribbean (Ezcurra, 2011;Fernández Lamarra and Costa de Paula, 2011;UNESCO, 2009), which has brought large populations of first-generation students to the universities, enabling the development of studentbased pedagogies and institutional strategies to deal with this new diversity of backgrounds (Ávila-Reyes et al., 2013;Navarro, 2012).
This new way of thinking about higher education and equity of opportunities has led to the establishment of scholarly networks and research programmes, such as the Improvement of Educational Quality and Equality through Reading and Writing UNESCO Chair (Cátedra UNESCO para el mejoramiento de la calidad y equidad de la educación en América latina, con base en la lectura y la escritura) in 1996. (Launched in 1992, the UNITWIN/UNESCO Chairs Programme promotes international inter-university cooperation and networking to enhance institutional capacities through knowledge sharing and collaborative work in key priority areas (UNESCO, n.d.).) The UNESCO Chair began at Universidad del Valle in Colombia, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso in Chile, and Universidad de Buenos Aires in Argentina, rapidly expanding to other regional branches. Its mission statement underlines the enhancement of higher education programmes and research in first-language literacy, promoting a discursive and interactive perspective. Cátedra UNESCO conferences started in 2001 and have evolved to be the major regional event for Hispanic Latin American scholars interested in writing, particularly at higher educational levels.
In 2003, a highly influential paper in the discipline was published by Paula Carlino, introducing the concept of 'academic literacy' (alfabetización académica) in the region. This paper was a groundbreaking piece that applied a label to the new field, and advocated programmatically for the institutionalization of teaching of writing within the academic disciplines (Carlino, 2003). Alfabetización académica is one of the most widely used terms in the Hispanic American region for naming the study of postsecondary writing, as some of the main publications in the field attest (Carlino, 2005;Parodi, 2010), although it entails multiple meanings. In fact, there is no consensual name for the field in the region, which alternates between the plural form (alfabetizaciones), a neologism mirroring the word 'literacy' (literacidad), and other denominations, such as 'higher education writing studies' Navarro et al., 2016). In any case, the widely used term 'alfabetización académica' does not correspond exactly to the movement of academic literacies in the UK, which stemmed from New Literacy Studies as a practice-based, situated understanding of literacy practices in postsecondary settings (Lea and Street, 1998;Street, 1999;Lillis and Scott, 2007). It rather denominates the emerging field of reading and writing in the university as a whole. Nonetheless, as discussed later in this paper, the academic literacies movement represents one of the many scholarly influences in Latin America.
In a retrospective piece published in 2013, Carlino suggests a conceptual reframing, keeping the term 'alfabetización académica' for naming the efforts made by universities in helping their students to access the literate cultures, while reserving the neologism 'literacidad(es) académica(s)' for the study of literacy practices (Carlino, 2013). However, theoretical discussion has been infrequent in our literature, and terms are often used without an explicit reference to any given conceptual framework. Although the field has accumulated a growing body of literature over more than two decades, and multiple teaching and research initiatives have flourished within the last 15 years, it has not been analysed as a field, and there is not full consensus about its epistemological or disciplinary status. Such an inquiry is relevant, especially when this growing field joins international forums on the topic. A dialogue among regions has already started, but further reflection on the nature of the inquiries carried out by our local research communities is necessary for understanding the nature of the Latin American contributions and fostering the international exchange. The object of this article is to describe the epistemological basis of a local development that might join an ongoing global conversation, understanding it on its own merits and not as a Latin American 'version' of academic literacies, following Donahue's (2009) suggestions about discourses of 'internationalization'.
A first step towards that goal was made in 2012, by Project ILEES (the Spanish acronym for 'Reading and Writing Initiatives in Higher Education'), a multilateral research initiative formed by American and Latin American scholars, including myself. We inquired into the formation of this practice-based discipline. The first stage of the project included data gathering through surveys and interviews with an ecologically representative sample of scholars from seven countries. The results showed the coexistence of an array of research traditions and schools of thought, as well as a variety of academic disciplines encompassing investigative and practical efforts . One of the questions of the survey regarded theoretical orientations, and influential authors, and the results were surprisingly varied. More than 30 per cent of the answers were single mentions, and there was a striking variety of orientations represented by the authors mentioned twice or more, which included varied, sometimes even conflicting frameworks and traditions.
This particular finding was puzzling. Do Latin American writing scholars blend these different approaches? Or do these approaches represent different orientations that coexist within the region and that can, therefore, be grouped into schools? The present research stemmed from these questions. To attempt an answer, I analysed 50 papers by scholars from the 6 Spanishspeaking countries represented in the ILEES survey (Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Venezuela, and Puerto Rico), looking for their citations. The questions posed above are rooted in a much broader inquiry about the epistemology of the emerging field. Methods used for disciplinary investigation are often borrowed from knowledge studies literature and include, besides disciplinary histories, 'genealogy, ethnography, interviews and surveys, bibliometrics, discourse analysis, archival research, organizational analysis, social theory, and critique' (Klein, 2000: 7). I chose the examination of written texts and how they rely on previous traditions by citing other texts as a means to delineate the field. As Devitt poses it, intertextuality says much about a community's values and epistemology (1991). Citation studies on American writing studies, for instance, have claimed to be descriptive of the theoretical core of the field (Mueller, 2012;Phillips et al., 1993).
As citation counts alone are not necessarily informative about disciplinary configuration, to make better sense of citation patterns I opted to frame this study as an intertextual analysis (Bazerman, 2004) rather than a citation study; one that explores the dynamics of exchanging and constructing knowledge through writing, and calls for a contextual and historicized interpretation of the trends found, going beyond the metrics. This approach enables a series of decisions to be made to depict exchange practices within a context of a developing disciplinary space, as is discussed in the methods section.
This study is only a step in a longer research agenda on the identities, epistemologies, and ideologies of the field, and it adds to other projects that have tried to map the development of postsecondary writing in the field Navarro et al., 2016;Ortiz Casallas, 2011;Tapia-Ladino et al., 2016). Although some of these studies have tackled publishing practices to understand the field, none of them has done it through citation research. The study is also in dialogue with inquiry on ideologies of literacy, such as Horner (2013), which compares the theoretical constructs, overlaps, and definitions of 'academic literacies' and 'composition studies'. Issues of ideology and epistemology are also discussed by Lillis and Scott (2007), who situate 'Academic Literacies', as a movement rooted in critical inquiry, against 'textual biases', which shifts the inquiry to literacy practices. Nonetheless, the articulating theoretical constructs are still not fully apparent for this emerging body of research and practice, and one of the main aims of this study is to track them through the use of literature. To this end, the research questions are: 1. What theoretical configurations, particular to Hispanic Latin America, can be inferred from citation patterns? 2. What intellectual influences can be traced through citation patterns between scholarship on writing produced in non-Latin American regions and the Latin American research and teaching sites? 3. What intellectual influences and local clusters of theory can be traced within scholarship on writing produced in the Hispanic Latin American region?
Question 1 aims to discover the theoretical and epistemological core represented by citations. Questions 2 and 3 aim to discover grouping formation and dynamics of academic exchange, both within the region and within global frameworks and languages other than Spanish.

1: Sampling
The first difficulty in studying the intertextual dynamics of scholarly work in the region was the lack of a single established database of citation data that could ease the sampling process.
In the first place, citation indexes such as Web of Knowledge are highly selective. Very few local journals are part of Web of Knowledge. Second, indexes are English-biased (Phelan, 1999). For these reasons, alternative indexation and database systems, such as Latindex, have developed in Latin America, and might constitute a better place to start an inquiry focused on the region (Flores et al., 2009). However, as the ILEES research group has highlighted, there are no visible, indexed periodical journals on writing studies in the region . So, regardless of the indexation, a single source of bulk data on citations is not available. While most citation studies resort to automated indexes and databases, the present one used ILEES survey responses for sampling, since most of the research questions stemmed directly from these findings.
The ILEES survey was conducted in two phases. It started in June 2012 in Spanish, and it was initially distributed to scholars of writing in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico. The countries were chosen 'because of the high level of activity in them among Spanish speaking countries as perceived by the team; this perception has been confirmed through the survey' . A preliminary list of 20 scholars, known for their publications or their leadership in programmatic efforts, was created by the researchers based on their insiders' knowledge. This preliminary list was sent to two scholars in each country for validation. Additionally, the survey included a space for referrals, as a result of which the survey was forwarded to new scholars. By the end of 2012, Brazil, Venezuela, and Puerto Rico were added to the sample using the same snowball techniques. Responses were collected until September 2013, and totalled 118 responses out of 321 invitations sent.
The survey included an open-ended question for providing the latest publications. I selected the latest journal article, edited book chapter, or conference paper mentioned by each participant that met the following criteria, from the six Spanish-speaking countries surveyed: 1. Texts on academic, university, professional, or any other form of postsecondary writing.
Reading research was only considered when it related to academic literacy, or to practices that are specific to the university disciplines. 2. Texts on secondary-level writing, only if they were articulated with higher education writing. Texts on language arts teaching, secondary-level writing, reading comprehension, and discourse analysis not pertaining to academic practices were excluded.
The decision to include different types of sources -journal articles, book chapters, and conference papers -was made in order to reflect ecologically the actual responses, since these are the genres actually written by writing scholars in the region, according to survey data. Additionally, it controlled the bias towards linguistic-driven studies that might have resulted from selecting only journal articles, since most of the periodicals in the region are linguistics journals. In order to make the sample more representative of current citation practices, I included the latest work in the field available online by each of the Latin American scholars who had not participated in the survey but were named as local influencers by survey participants. These procedures generated a total of 50 papers.
The distribution of countries of origin of the papers is similar to the response numbers obtained from each country in the survey, as Table 1 shows.

2: Coding and analysing
I collected the list of references for each article in the corpus, crediting the first author for the sake of clarity and assuming that within the field the first author is also the most significant, while keeping track of co-authored texts for the qualitative analysis. A total of 1,622 references were obtained. As the criterion for measuring influence in this study is the number of papers reached by a given author, self-citation was excluded. The total number of authors referenced across the 50 papers, excluding self-citation, is 747. In order to control the extraneous variable of one paper being highly influenced by a single author and therefore citing multiple documents by this author, I decided to count the number of times an author is mentioned by paper, regardless of the number of articles being cited. As explained earlier, I decided to capture influence through the reach of an author to different papers of the sample: 179 authors were cited in at least 2 of the 50 papers, constituting the group of influential authors used to perform all the analyses in the present article. These analyses include: 1. An analysis of the most influential authors defined by frequency of citation. Scholars who got more than two citations fall under this count, and the ones reaching 10 per cent of the sample were included in graphs. 2. A frequency analysis of the influential authors' origins, using the coding system shown in Table 2. Code names were chosen to avoid redundancy. Shaded cells in Table 2 correspond to the categories used. 3. An analysis of the citation frequency of documents, to identify the most influential works within the community. These results were used to make sense of theoretical orientations and groupings. 4. Author co-citation analysis, which helped to validate grouping and clustering interpretations (Mullins et al., 1977;White, 2001). According to Biancani and McFarland (2013), descriptive network research allows mapping the shape or structure of intellectual fields, commonly through author co-citation analysis, 'a variation on cocitation analysis, in which two authors, rather than two papers, are linked when both are cited by a later paper' (Biancani and McFarland, 2013: 157).
Visual analytics tools are currently used within the emergent fields of information visualization and digital humanities. Although data visualization usually refers to big data sources and data mining (Liu, 2012), there is no automated source to create a database of citation of the field in the region, as previously shown. To be able to represent co-citation data, an ad hoc database was put together, gathering authors that reached at least five articles of the corpus (10 per cent), in order to create a small network representation. This dataset, comprising 657 combinations of co-cited authors, was graphed using Gephi software, and then different built-in parameters were applied, such as the layout and the Louvain community detection algorithm (Blondel et al., 2008). Figure 1 represents the 26 authors that were cited in between 10 per cent and 50 per cent of the corpus, and who therefore can be inferred to represent the epistemic core of the field in the region. Out of the 26 authors, 10 are Latin Americans. Origin codes were applied in order to describe both international and local dynamics of influence. As national origins are highly heterogeneous and not particularly significant to depict dynamics of exchange, the chosen codes mix geographical origin and main publishing language. Figure 2 represents the origin distribution. Chile (Parodi, Marinkovich, and Peronnard). Among them, local leaders of Cátedra UNESCO in Chile (Parodi) and Argentina (Arnoux) can be found. A salient feature of this graphic is the lack of authors from the other Latin American countries in the sample: Colombia, Mexico, Venezuela, and Puerto Rico. The number of papers in the sample from the three latter countries was low, which might explain their consistently low numbers. For this reason, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela were only considered for aggregated analysis.

Mapping the theory
Colombia was the most represented country in the sample (N=16), so its absence from this top chart is an indication of the lack of highly cited scholars from this country. However, when analysing the 'long tail' (that is, authors that reached 2 to 4 papers), 16 Colombian influential authors emerged. The long-tail analysis also showed that Argentina has 33 of the local influential authors, whereas Chile only has 8 of them, so Argentina appears as the regional scholarly leader. Chilean scholars are less well represented, but, as data suggests, reach a high number of papers -three of them are indeed among the top influential authors of the region, whereas there is a bigger group of prolific Colombian authors populating the long tail.
Another interesting finding is the lack of Brazilian influential authors. Although Brazil was not included in the sampled papers, this country has a tradition in writing and genre theory, both in L1 and L2, and a vast array of influential scholars (Cristovão et al., 2015). However, when it comes to intellectual influence, it looks like the language divide plays a significant role in keeping lusophone and hispanophone research communities encapsulated. This data extends to publishing practices in the subject, and it has been confirmed by other studies  and different sources of data .
A second variable to examine about the top influencers is their theoretical orientations. Local scholars come from either linguistics (Parodi, Arnoux, Marinkovich, Peronard, Di Stefano, and Garcia Negroni) or educational/developmental psychology (Carlino, Vazquez, Ferreiro, and Marrucco). Chilean top scholars all come from linguistics -even from the same academic department in Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso; whereas Argentine influential scholars have mixed backgrounds. Further, the educational/developmental psychology group is comprised only of Argentine scholars.
As for foreign influentials, theoretical backgrounds will be defined by their most cited papers and the uses given to these citations in the corpus, as many of them have moved across different topics of study, making them difficult to classify within a single orientation. These papers are presented in Table 3.  (Halliday, 1978;Halliday, 1985) and appraisal theory (Martin and White, 2005). Swales and Bhatia are mainly credited for their work on genre analysis of academic and professional texts (Bhatia, 1993;Swales, 1990;Swales, 2004), whereas Hyland is drawn on for his work on academic writing (2000). This divides international linguists into at least two groups: one providing mostly linguistics tools, and another providing mostly linguistic analyses of writing. Lastly, Van Dijk is cited only for his early works in textual linguistics. The second group emerging from the analysis is formed by psychological and cognitive approaches. The first is American psychologist Walter Kintsch, although his work pertains more to cognitive sciences. He was first known by his works with Van Dijk about reading comprehension, which places them both in a sort of intellectual vicinity; however, Kintsch's most cited document in the sample was Comprehension (1998).
Linda Flower and Carl Bereiter could also be placed in this group, although Flower might well be placed within the American writing studies tradition, which situates her in a vicinity with that group. Both Flower and Bereiter are fundamentally credited for pioneering works on written composition cognitive processes (Bereiter and Scardamalia, 1987;Flower and Hayes, 1981), as Table 3 shows. Spanish psychologist Montserrat Castelló could also be considered within the psychology circle, particularly because her most cited article articulates a research study on teaching that relies on previous cognitive process models (Castelló, 2002).
A third interesting theoretical group is 'rhetoric and composition', composed of Charles Bazerman and David Russell. Russell is cited by 11 papers of the sample, 5 of which are devoted to the study of writing across the curriculum, and only 1 to genre. Bazerman's second most cited work is a guide to writing across the curriculum (WAC) (Bazerman et al., 2005). Therefore, WAC and genre theory are the main topics cited from the American school. Bazerman's most cited book (cited in 10 per cent of the sample) is Shaping Written Knowledge (Bazerman, 1988).
It is unclear why a book on the rhetoric of science, not translated, has become so popular among an emergent community of writing researchers. In order to elucidate this, a qualitative analysis was performed by tracking instances and interpreting their uses. Eight in-text citations were found. Three of them corresponded to a broad strategy of aggregation, by mentioning this work among others that have researched the scientific article. Four other instances cite a situated view on writing; through claims which are general but accurate, such as activity shapes texts, genres change over time, and the context of activity is integral to learning writing (my translations). Only one reference uses the book as an actual source of an assertion concerning the ways in which physicists read scientific articles. Therefore, citations to the influential authors might often serve the purpose of 'imparting meaning to a source', rather than using it as a source for research (Small, 1978: 328). In these cases, citations are a symbol of a concept or a method, in a relation that is independent of the document itself. Authors frequently present a particular reading position towards sources that are not necessarily rooted in what those sources actually state, frequently without providing page numbers, which is a strategy that contributes to loosen the relation between the source and the quotation. This is also the case for several of the instances of citations to Flower and Hayes (1981) tracked, and it is perhaps the same for other international influentials.
Daniel Cassany, a Catalan scholar, is often identified with language pedagogy (didáctica de la lengua), an area placed at the nexus of teaching practice, learning theories, and applied linguistics. Within language pedagogy, I would also include psychologist Monterrat Castelló. Cassany's most cited works placed him in two different epistemological spaces. One is a book on writing pedagogy (Cassany, 1999), while the other tackles literacy, which is closer to the British tradition of critical literacies (Cassany, 2008).
Academic literacies is less represented in Figure 1, but it reaches a significant number of papers. Whereas the only author in the top influentials from this tradition is Mary Lea, different documents by Street are cited four times, and documents by Phyllis Creme are cited three times. Roz Ivanić was referenced only in one paper, which left her outside the analysis. In sum, this tradition reaches 13 of the papers as a group, but has no significantly cited documents.
As for Pierre Bourdieu, his works are cited by six different papers, but their uses are disparate, even being used occasionally as epigraphs and long quotations as a means of conclusion. Lastly, Mijail Bakhtin (Bajtin) has only one work cited, 'The problem of speech genres', published early in Spanish as an essay collection (1982). All of the ten papers used it as a loose reference to genre, mostly just mentioning his name. Therefore, this reference corresponds to a concept symbol (Small, 1978), with no direct quotations or further elaborations on the concept.
So far, I have described a 'topography' of the cited texts of foreign influential authors in Latin American writing studies, represented in Figure 3. This topography not only tries to sketch disciplinary spaces (limited by the main bubbles), but also represents the theoretical closeness and vicinities that can be inferred from the analysis above. Thus, the representation is not an attempt to draw the actual intellectual positions of the authors with respect to writing studies, but rather the relative positions of their most cited papers by the community represented in the sample. For example, Van Dijk's position in the chart is representative of his earlier works in textual linguistics and not of his current scholarship.
In sum, this representation is a result of the examination of the uses and the reception of the articles written by the top foreign influentials (Swales and Leeder, 2012). The space metaphor tries to grasp the continuities among traditions. The strong presence of disciplines of origin, some of them not obviously linked to writing (such as Van Dijk's works), suggests that Latin American writing studies is still a heterogeneous emerging field, on its way to consolidate the set of problems that may bound it as a 'compact discipline' (Toulmin, 1972).

Two inferred disciplinary spaces
A still pending question when analysing theoretical orientations is whether the local configuration mirrors the identified foreign groupings (that is, SFL, ESP, Language Pedagogy, Psychology, and so on) or if the actual Latin American configuration takes the form of a local synthesis. Author cocitation analysis provides enriching insights into the configuration of this group, as can be seen in Figure 4. Nodes represent the authors, colour coded according to the community detection modularity analysis powered by the software. Lines indicate that two nodes were cited together. Combined colours in lines show co-citation between nodes that belong to different communities. The thicker the line, the more connections exist between the two nodes. For instance, people cite together Parodi and Carlino, Lea and Bazerman, and Cassany and Parodi, even when they do not belong to the same grouping. The size of the nodes represents their weight in the network. That is, the bigger the circle, the higher the number of authors with whom the node was co-cited. Figure 4 does not indicate number of citing papers, but rather number of connections between them.
The first group (red) represents mostly linguists, grammarians, and genre analysts. In addition, this group shows more 'central' nodes, with fewer combined connections, such as Swales or Parodi, and more 'peripheral' nodes, such as Bazerman, who gets several connections to group 2. This coincides with the analysis of the most cited documents of this author, which were divided between a book on scientific genres (closer to group 1) and a lesser cited book on writing pedagogy (closer to group 2). The second group (cyan) appears at first glance to be a mix of psychological, pedagogical, and discursive approaches. However, this blending is central to understanding the nature of local configurations. In a recent talk, Brazilian scholar Orlando Vian Jr highlighted how Brazilian genre studies have synthesized traditions that might be seen as non-compatible, constituting what he calls a 'southern epistemology', rooted in hybridization processes that came about with postmodernity and globalization (Vian, 2015). This might also be the case for the Hispanic American writing studies community. For example, one of the first documented research projects in the field was led by Argentine key scholar Elvira Arnoux in 1987, titled 'Principles of text linguistics and psycholinguistics applied to the teaching of reading and writing at secondary and postsecondary education' (Pereira, 2006). Textual and discourse perspectives alike are present in foundational documents of Catedra UNESCO. On a similar note, Donahue underlines that there was a strong tradition of psycholinguistic approaches in Latin America, to which the works of American composition got blended or adapted (Donahue, 2009). Carlino, Cassany, Vásquez, and Castello are closer to teaching and learning approaches, with which seminal influences from psycholinguistics also got blended.
In consequence, Figure 4 suggests the coexistence of two strong disciplinary traditions as the basis for writing studies in Latin America that might be identified with linguistics and applied linguistics (group 1) and psychology and education (group 2). Figure 4 also shows some similarities and differences with the intellectual topography of the influences shown in Figure 3. In general, theoretical clustering in Hispanic Latin America seems to be particular to the region, and relates closely to the intellectual topography proposed. There is one group -more orthodox -tied to applied linguistics and genre analysis, drawing from resources of other disciplines, such as rhetoric and composition, represented in the upper left side of Figure 3. There is a second group -more eclectic -based on teaching and learning, psychology of learning, and cognitive processes approaches; they correspond to the influences represented in the lower right side of Figure 3.
It is important to remember that the clusters depicted in Figure 4 do not mean that these groups of authors constitute a community; it means instead that these authors are cited together by the communities detected. If any theoretical grouping can be inferred, it would be formed by Latin American scholars in the sample citing them together.

Conclusion
The present inquiry aimed at constituting a first step towards an empirically grounded discussion on epistemologies of the emergent field of writing studies in the Hispanic American region. Being an emergent field, hybridization and 'cross-fertilization' processes, enabled by both influencing and borrowing of theories and methods, are to be expected (Klein, 1996). However, at least two different kinds of hybridization can be inferred from these findings, as will be argued below.
The research questions, posed from general to particular, will be revisited in reverse order. Research question 3 was 'What intellectual influences and local clusters of theory can be traced within scholarship on writing produced in the Latin American region?' Author co-citation analysis strongly suggests the existence of two well-defined groups, substantiating different language and literacy ideologies. Group 1 might be supposed to be more text-focused, as many papers in the sample focused on academic discourse analysis as a product, a finding also reported in Navarro et al. (2016) from a qualitative perspective and with a different sample. Group 2, instead, is more actively engaged in teaching and learning topics. A recent study based on interviews with key scholars in the field  confirms that these two groups represent not only conflicting, partially divergent epistemologies, but that they also embody a jurisdictional dispute, that is, opposed claims of who should be in charge of this scientific object (Abbott, 1988). However, the particulars of the epistemological models each of them use, and the knowledge claims they substantiate, have not been analysed yet, and this clearly calls for a qualitative approach.
Research question 2 inquired about the intellectual influences that can be traced through citations. The results show an interesting pattern in which the main influences come from anglophone and European traditions, and many of them may be interpreted as 'concept symbols' (Small, 1978), in other words, as citations that refer to the concepts rather than to the actual content of these sources. However, the two clusters inferred from co-citations (see Figure 4) are fairly coincident with two groups of influential authors -the linguistics and applied linguistics cluster coincides with linguistics, and rhetoric and composition authors (ESP, SFL); whereas the education and psychology cluster correlates with psychology, language didactics, and academic literacies influential authors (see Figure 3).
As for the local influences, it seems that the construction of prestigious, authorized voices comes with participation on networks, such is the case of UNESCO Chair participants in Chile and Argentina. It is also salient that so far, these two countries seem to have produced more influential scholars; however, data of each country profile that could not be included in this article may offer more insights on the issue.
Lastly, regarding question 1 about theoretical configurations particular to Latin America, two kinds of hybridization processes were found. One that represents a division, probably due to the early stage of development of the field, in which an emergent object of study is disputed by two parent disciplines (Klein, 1996). Since these parent disciplines, education and psychology, and linguistics and applied linguistics, are still also emerging, studies on higher education writing can still be clearly grouped with them. Still, there are some 'boundary-crossers', represented by the thinner brown, blended lines of the author co-citation graph (Figure 3), which cite together influential authors from both clusters in their research.
A second kind of hybridization is what I call synthesis. It is primarily represented by the education and psychology cluster, but also by the 'boundary-crossers' that blend these approaches with applied linguistics or vice versa. Relying on Vian's (2015) and Donohue's (2009) claims, I would argue that these syntheses, which bring together traditions seemingly conflicted such as cognitive and social orientations, represent a unique local development, rooted both in reading comprehension and discourse analysis research; traditions that have been strong in the region and constitute the core previous work of local influential scholars. And that will probably provide renewed approaches to join an international conversation on academic literacies.
These interpretations are inferences derived from empirically grounded citation patterns. Further research is needed to confirm, dismiss, or reinterpret them, understanding that the current stage of disciplinary development calls for epistemological debates and definitions. postsecondary writing and writing in disciplines, and her latest research project traces the emergence of this field in Latin America.