3.2. Linguists study Scientists
While the following works do not explicitly self-define as narrative or story-driven, this section includes examples of co-narrated social action of scientists as produced through the eyes and minds of linguists. This literature detour, therefore, will sample (1) corpus-based analyses of scientists’ linguistic activity (e.g. Swales, 2004), ethnomethodological inquiries into the conversational practices of scientists (e.g. Jacoby & Gonzalez, 1991), and Canagarajah’s (2018) inquiry into spatial repertoires – material assemblages that co-constitute the activity of scientists and thereby come to co-constitute the production of science.
3.2.1. Swales organizes scientific practices into genres
While slightly beyond the direct scope of this literature review, Swales’ (2004), corpus-assisted, data-driven genre analysis of scientific communities is a foundational link between applied linguistics and science as a co-constructed communicative activity. Swales’ pertinent genres include research articles, dissertations, conference presentations, colloquial and research group meetings, as well as their embedded intergeneric connections. In other words, just like the polyphonic worlds of competing stories highlighted in Section 2, “genres no longer [exist] as single—and perhaps separable—communicative resources but as forming complex networks of various kinds in which switching mode from speech to writing (and vice versa) can—and often does—play a natural and significant part” (Swales, 2004, p. 2). Genres are therefore not merely forms or structures, but ways of being – a fact often overlooked in the common corpus-based pedagogical appropriations of his research. However, as this literature review focuses more on storytelling practices, Swales’s work—while influential in the development of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and data-driven approaches to L2 academic writing—serves more as a foundational reference than a central focus.
3.2.2. Ochs and colleagues analyze a physics lab
Nonetheless, bringing up Swales’s discussion of genre resonates with the various genres of activity analyzed by Ochs and her colleagues in a physics lab in California. (Jacoby, 1998; Jacoby & Gonzalez, 1991; Jacoby & Ochs, 1997; Ochs & Jacoby 1995; Ochs et al., 1994). Most resulting publications employed conversation analysis and language socialization frameworks to reconceptualize a physics lab as a site of diverse co-constructed scientific activity. Jacoby and Gonzalez (1991), for instance, challenge notions of fixed novice-expert hierarchies, arguing that expert-novice relations were contingent on (1) the expertise of the individual, (2) conversational participants and (3) the domain of knowledge. Stratified social constructs like principal investigator (PI), postdoc, or graduate student were insufficient to determine who assumed the role of “novice” or “expert” in a given conversational timepoint. In other words, in “the complex array of questions and answers, of evaluations and agreement, of explication and problem-solving…participants negotiate who is more or less knowing at particular interactional moments” (Jacoby & Gonzalez, 1991, p. 174; see also Jacoby & Ochs, 1997). This is an important supplement to the STS literature, which often adopts sociological lenses that also discuss the co-construction of knowledge, but through actors with more static identities.
However, beyond the individual, spatial and temporal dimensions also drive the production of physics, as the “seasonal calendar of physics conferences” (Ochs & Jacoby, 1997, p. 498) drives consensus – “the problem of time [rather than science] becomes the rationale for discussing the re-ordering, redesigning, condensing, and deleting of material” (ibid.) Furthermore, physics discussions often move between spatial worlds through visualizations like graphs — as “visual representation links linguistic constructions and embodied gestures…and [physicists] journey together through virtual symbolic space and simultaneously experience the effects of manipulated and imagined physical processes” (Ochs et al., 1994[1]). In short, Ochs and her students demonstrate not only how science is discursively produced but also extend this notion of co-production to scientists’ real-time contingent turn-taking – an important ethnomethodological extension of Latour (1987) and Latour and Woolger’s (1986) sociological analysis.
[1] This source was accessed in epub format and therefore did not have exact page numbers.
Ontogenetic Reflection
Next semester I’m going to start gathering data for my dissertation: an ethnographic study of STEM graduate students working within a student-run club that promotes advocacy and science communication at the intersection of science and policy.
When I first entered my PhD journey at Penn State, I wanted to be a dual-title student in Applied Linguistics and Asian Studies, and I wanted to explore English language ideologies in South Korea. My, how times have changed.
When I think about the sudden change and movement of my dissertation, I think about my first applied linguistics course, which was Language in Use, taught by Suresh Canagarajah. In that class, we spent each week reanalyzing an excerpt from his ethnography of STEM scholars and their multimodal embodied communicative practices. In other words, English accuracy and fluency were less important to international STEM scholars than the ability to translingually communicate across diverse semiotic repertoires and using multimodal affordances. At first I was not impressed. I thought it was boring to analyze the same transcript week after week. But then, by the end of my third semester, when I was in a different class taught by Sinfree Makoni, one of my classmates spoke about her interest in looking at the science communication practices of multilingual international scholars, and something clicked. I wanted to work with STEM people.
Coming up in the applied linguistics game, I was socialized to believe that language and communication was something that people learned in classrooms by reading books and attending seminars. However, through a snowball sample of informal interviews with STEM scholars across a multitude of disciplines, I realized that STEM education and humanities education take wildly different shapes. While humanities scholars, at least in the United States, take two to three years of classroom-based coursework before setting out to work relatively independently on a dissertation project, STEM scholars experience an increasing socialization as peripheral and then later central participants within a lab group. So while applied linguists often draw from—or at least used to draw from—Lave and Wenger’s community of practice and legitimate peripheral participation, I find the model to be much more applicable to the STEM discipline, where lab tasks, lab group meetings, and a shared goal of social action better map onto the community of practice framework.
Authorship practices also fascinated me. While it often surprised me to ever see more than two authors on an applied linguistics paper or a humanities paper, many STEM papers have upwards of 20 authors, sometimes as much as over 200. And the contribution to authorship is not one that’s limited to writing—this is a logocentric view that applied linguistics swims in day after day. Rather, as Canagarajah eloquently writes about, STEM scholars acknowledge the diverse contributions that go into a manuscript as a published scientific artifact—to borrow the term from Latour and Woolgar—literary inscriptions. The lab manager who secures and orders materials, the graduate students that perform lab tasks day after day, labs thousands of miles away who might receive a sample in the mail, analyze it, and send the results back—all of these folks often earn authorship credits.
However, I also think that applied linguists don’t pay much attention to STEM scholarship. This, despite the fact that, particularly in Global North universities, many international students come as STEM majors. At least here at Penn State, the vast majority of international undergraduates that I encounter are majoring in some kind of engineering field. It would behoove us as applied linguists to consider more seriously the similarities and differences that STEM students and faculty negotiate compared to those in the social sciences or the humanities. Yes, we are all in the business of creating knowledge—but nor is credit or writing distributed in similar fashions.
What I find most striking about working with STEM students is that they seem to have a more positive take on storytelling—at least the folks in this club—than most applied linguists that I encounter. Even qualitative researchers seem to embrace the term “narrative” over “story.” As I’ve said many times, I think this is because narrative entails more textual legitimacy, an artifact that one can interrogate and deconstruct based on criteria of truth, while story and storytelling are more embodied, relational, distributed, and hard to typologize. Yet what science communicators understand, what business people understand, what organization scholars understand, is that when it comes to organizing social action, when it comes to securing and coordinating resources, story is everything. What is the stock market but a massive storytelling assemblage that uses antenarratives—or bets on the future—in order to price assets within the present?
Now, I’m not here to glorify the stock market. But what I will say is that folks in STEM and folks in business seem to know and understand something that applied linguists refuse to look at — a path many seem to disregard or only deem appropriate for children, when in reality that path is being walked by some of the most successful people within our society. Those who tell good stories move others. Those who move others move the world.
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