1 - Research Genres in Context

Summary

Chapter 1 situates research genres in today’s rapidly changing technological and social contexts. The aim of the chapter is to set the scene in which research genres enact social actions, particularly through new media environments, andto focus on systems of genres of research that are evolving in response to the multiple accountabilities of scientific knowledge production, dissemination and consumption today. In reviewing some of the consequences of globalisation, this chapter briefly reviews the particular conditions that post-globalisation processes – for example, skilled migration and the boost in researchers’ mobility – have created in academic and research settings. The chapter also briefly describes the effects of such processes on researchers’ socioliterate activity at a time of unprecedented sociocultural and sociolinguistic diversity.