Writing and culture in the post-process era

Does the notion of culture, currently under wide-ranging critique across the social sciences, still have a future? In this paper I discuss three possible uses of the culture concept in the field of second language writing for the 21st century: (1) Turning the cultural lens back on ourselves (where "ourselves" means the very academics who have found the concept most useful in the past); (2) Investigating continuity, universality, and hybridity, whereas the culture concept has traditionally been used to investigate difference, localization, and cultural "purity"; and (3) Expanding, contracting, and complexifying the scope of the culture concept. I conclude by arguing for a view of L2 writing that takes into account the full range of social and cultural contexts impacting L2 writing, rather than focusing narrowly on skills and processes of writing (in the classroom) in themselves.