Past Event

English-medium publishing in a global context: Drawing on the resources of academic research networks

Mary Jane Curry (in collaboration with Theresa Lillis)
Margaret Warner Graduate School of Education & Human Development
University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, USA

About the Presentation

Multilingual scholars located outside of Anglophone contexts face growing pressure to publish in English-medium journals. However, they often have limited resources to meet such demands. In this talk I present findings from an eight-year longitudinal “text-ethnographic” study, “Professional Academic Writing in a Global Context,” exploring how 50 psychology and education scholars in southern and central Europe are responding to such pressure. A key finding indicates that to secure publication in English-medium journals, multilingual scholars may need more than individual linguistic and rhetorical competence. Rather, participation in academic research networks functions as a key resource for multilingual scholars’ publishing. I will examine the importance of networks and track how scholars gain access to and participate in them, in some cases through ties to “network brokers” who are central to networks and can facilitate others’ entry into them. I will foreground several core dimensions of academic research networks: local and transnational, formal and informal, strong and weak, durable and temporary and explore what these dimensions signify in terms of providing scholars access to resources for publishing. The research suggests that strong, local, durable networks are crucial to enabling scholars’ participation in transnational networks, which in turn support publishing in English.

About the Presenter

Mary Jane Curry is associate professor of language education at the University of Rochester’s Warner Graduate School of Education and Human Development, and founding director of the school’s Writing Support Services. She is co-author of Academic writing in a global context: The politics and practices of publishing in English (Routledge, 2010) and Teaching academic writing: A toolkit for higher education (Routledge, 2003). She has published in journals including TESOL Quarterly, Written Communication, English for Specific Purposes, the International Journal of Applied Linguistics, and Community College Review. She is currently engaged in a study of engineers writing for publication.