Navigating Genres in Interdisciplinary Life Sciences Doctoral Programs

ABSTRACT

This article explores how doctoral writers in interdisciplinary life sciences programs navigate genre-ing activities across multiple disciplines. In interdisciplinary environments, approaches to doing and teaching writing may benefit from a reimagining, particularly as findings suggest that writing at interdisciplinary boundaries is unsuited to apprenticeship models of pedagogy. I argue that meta-genre is a productive way of engaging with the destabilization of existing knowledge in technical communication in interdisciplinary spaces and of fostering interdisciplinary writing knowledge.

KEYWORDS:

• Science communication
• rhetorical genre studies
• interdisciplinary writing

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Ashley Mehlenbacher, Kathryn Plaisance, Aishwarya Ramachandran, and two anonymous reviewers for their generous and constructive comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript. Thank you as well to the doctoral writers who volunteered their time to participate in this study—this work would have been impossible without them.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. One example from the United States is the Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT), which supports graduate traineeship.

2. The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), which funds science and engineering research in Canada, plans to invest $1.3 billion (approximately $950 million USD) in research in 2022 (Government of Canada, 2021). Compare this investment with the $10.2 billion USD in resources available through the NSF (National Science Foundation, n.d..).

3. Tardy et al. (2020) consider such reflection to be metacognition: “a writer’s ability to consider and regulate cognitive processes while planning or writing” (p. 298). Meta-talk, when elicited for the purpose of reflecting on or planning decisions about writing, might be understood as a metacognitive process, although meta-talk may serve other functions as well.

4. The phrase writing up is acknowledged as being problematic in writing, and doctoral writing, scholarship (e.g., Kamler & Thomson, 2014). I employ it here as it aligns with the windowpane language that participants often used to articulate the conventions of interdisciplinary writing.

5. This participant did eventually pass their defense.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [752-2017-1184].

Notes on contributors

Sara Doody

Sara Doody is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Waterloo where she is involved in research exploring climate rhetoric and transdisciplinary partnerships between philosophy and science. Her research explores writing in inter-/transdisciplinary contexts and how individuals navigate, or fail to navigate, various value-laden writing practices.