894 Scaffolding for synthesis

Looking at the academic interview genre is important to English studies in several ways.

• First, genre research has been productive within rhetoric, composition, and writing studies as a middle term.  Bazerman (1994) and Miller (1994) both argue its importance here.
• It has also been productive in applied linguistics, another subfield of English studies, as argued by Swales (1990, 2004).
• The academic interview genre also offers insights into the discipline and serve as an intermediary genre for understanding disciplinary argumentation, and hence, indirectly offering insights related to Writing across the Curriculum.
• However, only by using a richer, network-oriented framework for theorizing genre can we move beyond a simple genre analysis and understand what this genre tells us about the values of higher education and gain insights on the ecology of higher education.

Which 2 – 4 theories are you choosing and why? How are they similar enough that you can justify getting them to work together? How do they fill each other’s gaps?

• My primary analysis will continue to be based on Spinuzzi’s version of CHAT, as in case study #3.
• I will add to this genre theory, as in case study #3.
• Finally, I will justify the decision to move genre to the middle of the network, separating it from a “tools” or “instruments” node.  This is because I found the idea of objects as having agency to be quite persuasive.  This idea comes from ANT, but it is also alluded to in Bateson and Gibson, and in a slightly different way perhaps, an essential feature of Rickert.  I still need to determine whether I need to bring in more of one (or two) of these theories, or whether I can simply grab the one insight.

How do these theories align with how you position yourself as a scholar?

• All of these theories look at how writing does work in the world.  That is how I define my research interest.  I am interested in the texts, the human players, the discourse community, the work that is being done, and the cultural framework.  This framework captures all of that.
• In fact, I am also interested in bringing cognitive into conversation with the social for a true sociocognitive approach.  I think Bateson’s theory opens the door to paying more attention to the cognitive. Genre theory also does so, to a degree, as CHAT’s debt to Vygotsky.  However, I do not intend to develop the cognitive here, though I would like to open that door.

How do these theories align with your own biases and background (the reason you came to this project in the first place)?

• I have been interested in genre for a long time, and I developed an interest in the ecological framework and CHAT last summer.  I find CHAT offers some ecological elements but is easier to operationalize.
• I prefer productive theory to critical theory.  I like the productivity of these theories.  That being said, my PhD program has made me much more aware of the fact that theory is never neutral and I do think it is possible to bring in critical insights in the employment of genre theory, at least.  I am not sure how much CHAT has been used that way.  Still, if we assume that any network, any structure, exists in a certain way that it could exist in a different way.  We also have to consider the possibility that some things are being left out, and what is being left out may be something (or someone) valuable.