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The dynamics of academic knowledge production: Text histories and text trajectories
Edited by Theresa Lillis and Mary Jane Curry
[Journal of English for Research Publication Purposes 3:1] 2022
► pp. 109–142

The dynamics of academic knowledge making in a multilingual world

Chronotopes of production

| The Open University, UK
| University of Rochester, U.S.
The use of ‘text history’ and ‘text trajectory’ constitutes an epistemological break from historically static approaches to the study of academic writing for publication. However, there is a need to further develop dynamic approaches to professional academic text production in ways which are robustly grounded in scholars’ lived practices. The paper briefly reviews the use of ‘text history’ and ‘text trajectory’, signalling their value and some limitations, and offers a heuristic foregrounding the importance of chronotope (Bakhtin, 1981 [1935]; Blommaert, 2018), ‘text cluster’, and multi/translingual practice. Drawing on a range of data relating to 12 multilingual scholars in four national sites from the longitudinal study Professional Academic Writing in a Global Context – interviews, observations, curriculum vitae – the paper foregrounds three key chronotopic dimensions in the dynamics of textual academic knowledge making: micro time, specific moments of text production; meso time trajectories of texts; and macro time, text production practices over scholars’ life trajectories. The paper challenges the widely repeated and taken-for-granted mantra that English is currently the (only) language of science and academic knowledge production and, as such, seeks to contribute to strategies of ‘delinking’ (Mignolo, 2007) in the field of academic writing studies.
Keywords: scholarly publishing, chronotope, knowledge production, heuristic method, longitudinal research
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The PAW study
    • 2.1The data used in this paper
  • 3.Dynamic approaches to academic text production: Expanding the lens
    • 3.1Moving beyond a ‘prescribed trajectory’ lens: Working with multiple chronotopes of production
    • 3.2Text cluster
    • 3.3Multi/translingual practice
    • 3.4A multi/translingual heuristic for exploring chronotopes of academic textual knowledge making
  • 4.Chronotopes of multi/translingual textual knowledge making
    • 4.1Scholars’ multi/translingual knowledge text making practices: Micro lens
      • 4.1.1Working with primary data
      • 4.1.2Entextualising knowledge
      • 4.1.3Interactions in entextualising knowledge
    • 4.2Scholars’ multi/translingual knowledge making across text clusters: Meso lens
    • 4.3Scholars publishing multilingually over time: Macro lens
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 2 June 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jerpp.22002.lil
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