Writing across cultures: ‘Culture’ in second language writing studies

For the past 50 years, culture has been one of the most contested concepts in Western academia. This is due in part to: (1) the notorious difficulty of defining the term (Williams 1983); and (2) its use as a causal explanation of individual behaviour. But certainly the biggest source of ‘culture trouble’ over the past half-century has been the development of anti-foundationalist, neo-Marxist, and postcolonial ‘critical’ philosophies, and their problematizing of the standard macro-variables of social science, including culture.