University of Michigan

Faculty Member, Technical Communication Program

Lecturer

College of Engineering

Thesis Title: Mutable mobiles: Online journals and the evolving genre ecosystem of science

About

I've recently begun a new position as a faculty member in the Technical Communication Program in the College of Engineering at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. My initial duties are to support technical-communication efforts in various upper-level laboratory and design-workshop courses in chemical engineering and biomedical engineering. A smaller portion of my appointment is devoted to administrative duties with the senior design course in biomedical engineering and with one of our program's writing awards. I'll discuss these duties in more detail as I become more settled in the position.


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My research program is concerned with two distinct but related questions raised by the advent of new digital communication media. The first and most basic question is this: How does the “writing space” (Bolter, 2001) in networked electronic media affect the ways texts work together as genre assemblages? That is, given the various ways that genre assemblages have been theorized (Spinuzzi, 2004, and references therein; Swales, 2004), and given our understanding of how the proximity of texts in both physical space and what could be called “social space” can affect their interactions, how might the electronic linkages of online texts, especially the ways that these electronic linkages can permanently change the discursive environments in which the texts reside and even change the texts themselves, affect their interactions as genre assemblages? Do we need a new way to understand assemblages of genres beyond the genre sets, systems, repertoires, ecologies, and others, that Spinuzzi and Swales describe? And, secondly, how do the new affordances of communication forums in cyberspace affect the way science is communicated in these spaces? How does the discursive construction of scientific knowledge take place in digital media? Carrying on the tradition of investigating basic problems in rhetoric and composition theory by addressing the “hard case” of scientific communication (e.g., Bazerman, 1988; Swales, 1990), this research should be of interest to scholars in rhetoric of science, digital rhetoric, and genre studies.

References:

Bazerman, C. (1988). Shaping written knowledge: The genre and activity of the experimental article in science. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.

Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print (2nd ed.). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Earlbaum Associates.

Spinuzzi, C. (2004). Four ways to investigate assemblages of texts: Genre sets, systems, repertoires, and ecologies. 22nd Annual International Conference on Design of Communication: The Engineering of Quality Documentation, Memphis, TN. 110–116.

Swales, J. M. (1990). Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Swales, J. M. (2004). Research genres: Explorations and applications. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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