what is academic discourse essay

Albert Weideman

Foundations of applied linguistics, what is academic discourse.

Academic discourse, which is historically grounded, includes all lingual activities associated with academia, the output of research being perhaps the most important. The typicality of academic discourse is derived from the (unique) distinction-making activity which is associated with the analytical or logical mode of experience . (Patterson & Weideman 2013).

Explanation

Academic discourse is more than grammar; it has functions like exposition, clarification, and conclusion, requiring us to do things with language like explain, define, compare, contrast, classify, agree, disagree, illustrate, elaborate, make claims, see implications, infer, exemplify, anticipate, and conclude. In addition, imbued as it is with cognitive as well as analytical processing, competence in handling academic language is far more than the ‘skills’ of listening, speaking, reading, and writing … Weideman 2018

The ability to handle this complex kind of language has at its centre the idea of using language in a logically qualified way: to make theoretical distinctions and for the purposes of analysis. Therefore the measurement of the ability must encompass many sub-components, to do justice to the complexity of the language ability being assessed. It follows, too, that a language test that is multifaceted is preferable to a monotone test design, and is likely to be more reliable. The same would apply to language courses to develop academic literacy, as the ability to handle academic discourse is usually termed.

Click to find Albert Weideman’s definition of academic literacy .

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Annotating Your Way into Academic Discourse

What is academic discourse.

In the simplest terms, academic discourse is how scholars—or academics, as they are sometimes called—speak and write. Believe it or not, you already have some experience with academic discourse. Think back to the type of writing you completed in high school. You were probably expected to write in a more formal manner than if you were writing a text message or email to your friends. This formality is one aspect of academic discourse. Think, too, about your participation in class discussions. You probably spoke more formally and precisely during these discussions than if you were simply hanging out and talking with your friends. Academic discourse is not as casual as everyday speaking and writing, but strives to be more formal, complex, and precise. At the college level, you will be expected to further develop your abilities to participate in academic discourse. While each field or discipline (e.g. Biology, English, Psychology) has its own specific ways of writing, all disciplines within the academy encourage more sophisticated forms of communication than those we use every day.

In order to participate in the conversations that go on across disciplines within the academy, you will need to hone your abilities to use academic discourse effectively. This is a goal that should guide you early in your general education courses and all the way through the courses in your major. Inserting your voice into scholarly conversations—rather than just summarizing what other scholars have said—may be new for you. Some previous instructors may have told you not to include your “opinion” or “voice” in your writing. Maybe you have been prohibited from using “I.” This was the case for one of my students who described the difficulty this posed for him while writing a research paper: “I had to concentrate most of my efforts on analyzing my sources while trying to make sure my own voice was heard. I will admit that it was tough due to the fact that much of my high school writing career had been focused on keeping my voice out of [my] paper[s].” While it may take some time for you to become comfortable inserting your own voice into scholarly conversations, as a college-level reader and writer it is important that you become a visible and active part of your writing, just as you are expected to be an active reader. As noted in the introduction, annotation—which brings the acts of reading and writing together—can lay the foundation for your productive participation in scholarly conversations.

What is Annotation?

You have probably been asked by instructors to “mark-up” something you are reading. Maybe you were asked to jot down questions or notes in the margins, highlight the important parts, or circle words you don’t know. Maybe you have developed these habits on your own. The act of marking up a text is commonly referred to as annotating. The word “annotate” comes from the Latin word for “to note or mark” or “to note down.” To annotate is exactly that—it’s when you make notes on a text. “What does this have to do with entering scholarly conversations?” you may be wondering. How can marking up a reading help you respond to other scholars in your discipline?

When you annotate you are writing as you read. You make notes, you comment, react, and raise questions in the margins of your text. Reflections of your engagement with the text and its author, annotations represent the initial and preliminary ways you are participating in a scholarly conversation with the author of what you are reading. As such, your annotations can serve as the basis for the more extensive contributions you will be expected to make to scholarly conversations. For example, if you need to write an essay about something you have read, you can return to your annotations—to the questions you posed and comments you made in the margins—because these are moments in which you are already interacting with the text and its author. From there you can develop those preliminary interactions into a more detailed and comprehensive response.

Annotations can be handwritten on a printed text or applied digitally on an electronic text. As noted in the Introduction, annotating digitally will allow you to mark up any text, including those on the Web, access your annotations from any computer, and share your annotations with others. See the Introduction for specific instructions on how to digitally annotate the reading selections in this textbook.

Instead of annotating the readings digitally, some instructors might ask you to print out the readings from this textbook and annotate them by hand as in the sample that follows

As you read the annotations in the sample text, notice the way the student uses annotations. The students ask questions, challenge points, define some words, and make personal connections. In this example, the students are engaging in more general annotation practices that are not governed by a specific reading strategy like those you will be introduced to in Chapter 2.

What Are the Differences Between Annotating and Highlighting?

It is important to keep in mind that annotating and highlighting often serve different purposes. Highlighting draws your attention to what you deem to be the important parts of a reading. Highlighting can help you recall those moments and the information presented in them. On the other hand, annotating encourages you to mark additional elements of the text—those beyond just “the important parts.” You will notice that in the previous samples highlighting is never used on its own. Rather, the yellow highlighting that does appear is accompanied by a comment, question, or some kind of written response. Although highlighting may be an important supplement to annotating, highlighting on its own is usually better preparation for assignments that ask you to memorize concepts and ideas from readings as opposed to those that ask you to write about and respond to what you have read. A record of your reading and your responses to the text and its author, annotations can provide you with the foundation for entering scholarly conversations, which is what you will be asked to do throughout college.

Writing as Critical Inquiry Copyright © by Keri Sanburn Behre, Ph.D. and Kate Comer, Ph.D. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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What is Academic Discourse?

W riting classes and textbooks use the term “academic discourse” to describe the kind of writing they want to see. That term often makes people think of old men in tweed jackets smoking pipes. But academic discourse happens everywhere outside of campuses and journals. Most professionals use a form of academic discourse. They just don’t call it that.

For writing teachers, the phrase “academic discourse” acts as a shorthand to describe a set of attitudes, habits, and practices. Using academic discourse by itself doesn’t make you liberal or conservative. It just means that you engage in critical thinking about issues, question your own beliefs, resist assumptions and bias, listen to other perspectives, and look for evidence to support your own beliefs.

True, academic journals hold other criteria when it comes to the structure and format of the writing itself, including citations. Academic writing can often seem dense or confusing. These traits only apply to certain disciplines. As you’ll see, many academic journals print articles accessible to wider readerships. When you come across written or spoken arguments, or even informative articles, look for these traits listed below. Try to incorporate them into your own writing and thinking.

Characteristic One: Multiple Perspectives 

The best academic writing engages a conversation on a topic and references other viewpoints. Academics do this throughout an essay or book, even on the sentence level through references to other researchers or even phrases that allude to conflicting opinions indirectly. Phrases such as “As some work suggests” or “the consensus is that” imply that while an idea is dominant it is not the gospel truth.

Characteristic Two: Complex, Multi-part Thesis and Argument

Characteristic three: qualifications , characteristic four: concessions , characteristic five: larger, more complex vocabulary.

Academic writers are often accused of using “big, pretentious words” to convey their ideas. Some writers will use big words for their own sake. However, effective writers will use bigger words in order to convey complex ideas more concisely, ideas that would otherwise take several words awkwardly strung together.

Characteristic Six: Length

Academic writers are also sometimes accused of writing long, wordy paragraphs as well as lengthy, 30-page articles that are dull. Some writers do this. However, the length of articles and even paragraphs has a point. Academic and professional audiences demand lots of evidence before they accept someone’s opinion. They want every aspect and detail of the evidence examined, and they want a clear explanation of how that evidence has or hasn’t been discussed by other scholars. Doing that takes a lot of space.

Cultivating these traits and habits into your writing will add depth and value. Above all, academic discourse promotes curiosity and open-mindedness. Learning requires us all to resist easy assumptions and bias towards ideas or opinions that fit our current worldviews. We approach scientific, cultural, and political issues from many sides and seek evidence to inform us. Academic writing embodies these characteristics.

Table of Contents

Ai, ethics & human agency, collaboration, information literacy, writing process, academic writing – how to write for the academic community.

• © 2023 by Joseph M. Moxley - University of South Florida

Academic writing refers to the writing style that researchers, educators, and students use in scholarly publications and school assignments. An academic writing style refers to the semantic and textual features that characterize academic writing and distinguish it from other discourses , such as professional writing , workplace writing , fiction , or creative nonfiction . Learn about the discourse conventions of the academic community so you can write with greater authority , clarity , and persuasiveness (and, in school settings, earn higher grades!).  

What is Academic Writing?

Academic writing refers to all of the texts produced by academic writers, including theoretical, empirical , or experience-based works. Examples:

• Students at the high school and undergraduate level write essays, book reviews, lab reports, reviews of literature, proposals–and more . These assignments often presume an audience of a teacher-as-examiner
• by proposing a new theory, method, application
• by presenting new empirical findings
• by offering new interpretations of existing evidence .

Different academic fields have distinct genres , writing styles and conventions because each academic field possesses its own set of rules and practices that govern how ideas are researched , structured , supported , and communicated . Thus, there is no one single style of academic writing. Rather, there are many different writing styles a writer might adopt , depending on their aims of discourse , media , writing tools, and rhetorical situation .

Related Concepts: Audience – Audience Awareness ; Discourse Community – Community of Practice ; Discourse Conventions ; Elements of Style ; Genre ; Professional Writing – Style Guide ; Persona ; Rhetorical Stance ; Tone ; Voice

Differences aside, there are a number of discourse conventions that academic writers share across disciplines. These conventions empower writers to establish authority and clarity in their prose –and to craft pieces that can be understood and appreciated by readers from various academic fields as well as the general public.

Features of Academic Discourse

• Academic writing tends to be  substantive  rather than superficial,  anecdotal ,  vague or underdeveloped.  For example, a paper on climate change would not just describe the observed changes in temperature, but might also delve into the scientific theories that explain these changes, the evidence supporting these theories, the potential impacts of climate change, and the debates within the scientific community
• Academic writing prioritizes evidence and logical reasoning over anecdotal observations , personal opinions, personal beliefs emotional appeals
• Members of the academic community expect authors to provide evidence for claims . When academics introduce evidence into their texts, they know their readers expect them to establish the currency, relevance ,  authority , accuracy , and purpose of any evidence they introduce
• Academic writers are careful to support their claims with evidence from credible sources, especially peer-reviewed , academic literature.
• Academics are sensitive to the ideologies and epistemologies that inform research methods.
• For example, when a psychology student studies the effects of mindfulness on anxiety disorders, they would need to understand that their research is based on the assumption that anxiety can be measured and quantified, and that it can be influenced by interventions like mindfulness training. They would also need to understand that their research is situated within a particular theoretical framework (e.g., cognitive-behavioral theory), which shapes how they conceptualize anxiety, mindfulness, and the relationship between them.
• Academic writing is expected to be objective and fair–and free of bias . This means presenting evidence in a balanced way, considering different perspectives , and not letting personal biases distort the analysis.
• It also involves recognizing the limitations of the research and being open to criticism and alternative interpretations .
• Academic writers are very careful to attribute the works of authors whom they’re quoting , paraphrasing , or summarizing . They understand information has value , and they’re careful to discern who the major thought leaders are on a particular topic . They understand they cannot simply copy and paste large sections of copyrighted material into their own work, even if they provide an attribution .
• Academic writers must also abide copyright laws , which protect the rights of authors and creators. This means, for example, that they cannot simply copy and paste large sections of copyrighted material into their own work, even if they provide a citation . Instead, they can use smaller excerpts under the principle of “fair use,” or they can seek permission from the copyright holder to use larger portions.

Organization

Academic writing is typically organized in a deductive way (as opposed to inductively ). Many genresof academic writing have a research abstract, a clear introduction , body, conclusions and recommendations.

Academic essays tend to have an introduction that introduces the topic, the exigency that informs this call to write. reviews pertinent research, and explains the problem — hypothesis, thesis, and rhetorical situation. the context and states the purpose of the writing (aka, the thesis! ), the body develops the arguments or presents the research, and the conclusion summarizes the main points and discusses the implications or applications of the research

Typically, the design of academic documents is plain vanilla, despite the visual turn in communication made possible by the ubiquity of design tools. Unlike professional writing, which tends to be incredibly visual, academic writing tends to be fairly traditional with its focus on alphabetical text as opposed to visual elements.

• Plain Design: Academic documents, such as research papers, theses, or scholarly articles, typically follow a minimalist design approach. They primarily consist of black text on a white background, with a standard, easy-to-read font. This “plain vanilla” design reflects the focus of academic writing on the content rather than the presentation. The aim is to communicate complex ideas clearly and without distraction.
• Limited Use of Visuals: Unlike in professional writing or journalism, visuals such as images, infographics, or videos are not commonly used in academic writing. When they are used, it’s usually to present data (in the form of graphs, charts, or tables) or to illustrate a point (with diagrams or figures). The visuals are typically grayscale and are intended to supplement the text rather than replace it.
• Structured Layout: Academic writing tends to follow a structured layout, with clearly marked sections and subsections. This helps to organize the content and guide the reader through the argument. However, aside from headings, there is usually little use of design elements such as color, bolding, or varied fonts to highlight different parts of the text.
• Lack of Interactive Features: With the transition to digital media, many types of writing have become more interactive, incorporating hyperlinks, multimedia, or interactive data visualizations. However, academic writing has been slower to adopt these features. While academic articles often include hyperlinks to references, they rarely include other interactive elements.

However, as digital media and visual communication become increasingly prevalent, we may see changes in the conventions of academic design.

• Academic writing tends to be formal in persona , tone , diction . Academic writers avoid contractions , slang, colloquial expressions, sexist use of pronouns . Because it is written for specialists, jargon is used, but not unnecessarily. However, the level of formality can vary depending on the discipline, the genre (e.g., a research paper vs. a blog post), and the intended audience . For instance, in sociology and communication, autoethnography is a common genre , which is a composite of autobiography , memoir, creative nonfiction, and ethnographic methods .
• In the last 20 years, there has been a significant move toward including the first person in academic writing. However, in general, the focus of discourse isn’t the writer. Thus, most academic writers use the first person sparingly–if at all.
• Academic writers use the citation styles required by their audiences .
• Specialized Vocabulary: Academics often use specialized vocabulary or jargon that is specific to their field. These terms can convey complex ideas in a compact form, contributing to the compressed nature of academic prose. However, they can also make the writing less accessible to non-specialists.
• Complex Sentence Structures: Academic writing often uses complex sentence structures, such as long sentences with multiple clauses, or sentences that incorporate lists or parenthetical information. These structures allow academic writers to express complex relationships and nuances of meaning, but they can also make the writing more challenging to read.
• Referential Density: Academic writing often refers to other works, theories, or arguments, either explicitly (through citations) or implicitly. This referential density allows academic writers to build on existing knowledge and engage in scholarly conversation, but it also assumes that readers are familiar with the referenced works or ideas.

1. When is it appropriate to use the first person?

Use of the first person is now more commonplace across academic disciplines. In order to determine whether first person is appropriate, engage in rhetorical analysis of the rhetorical situation .

Recommended Resources

• Professional Writing Prose Style
• First-Person Point of View
• Using First Person in an Academic Essay: When is It Okay?
• A Synthesis of Professor Perspectives on Using First and Third Person in Academic Writing

Brevity - Say More with Less

Clarity (in Speech and Writing)

Coherence - How to Achieve Coherence in Writing

Flow - How to Create Flow in Writing

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The Elements of Style - The DNA of Powerful Writing

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• Our Mission

Academic Discourse and PBL

Sammamish High School has defined seven key elements of problem-based learning used in our classrooms. This week we will explore the key element of academic discourse. How students communicate their discoveries and connect them to the overall learning is an essential part of what we do. Without proper communication, progress cannot be made on many projects.

What is Academic Discourse?

Academic discourse encompasses the idea of dialogue, the language used, and a format that facilitates a high level of communication in the classroom. The discourse can range from peer-to-peer discussion to whole-class discussion and can take on many forms: metacognition, presentations, debate, listening, writing, and critiquing others' work. What is important is that students are able to process and interact using academic vocabulary.

Academic discourse is not something that comes easily to most students; rather, it is something that needs to be taught, modeled and recognized by both teachers and students. With strategic instruction around what academic discourse sounds, looks and feels like, it can be a useful tool that enriches all classroom interactions and facilitates deeper learning and retention. As we developed the key elements of our program, the math department reflected on how academic discourse could become stronger in our classrooms.

We defined the most important components of academic discourse within a math classroom and developed an approach to implementing these components.

• We set the expectation that students will present problems and explain how they reached their answer.
• We emphasized the importance of using correct vocabulary. For example, math students often confuse an expression and an equation. Making that distinction is important for students. To retain the difference between the two words, they must practice using those words.
• We made writing in math a norm. Students will be expected to write about the process of how they reached an answer. This serves as another way of seeing how students are processing the material and how they are applying vocabulary words.

Processing the Problem

Through our problem-based learning curriculum, the complexity of problems forces students to communicate with each other more than if they were just working on individual homework. In our unit called "How can the student store maximize their profit?", students work in groups to study a product and how sales would change based on a price increase or decrease. They look at the cost of that product and, based on the data, create a quadratic equation to determine profit. This quadratic tells them at what price change the student store can maximize its profit for that specific product. Students are completing this project while learning about quadratics, so it presents many difficulties. For example, students need to process what each axis represents, and how income, profit and cost are related in this context, identifying break-even points and the vertex.

When presented with a PBL task that is especially difficult, students need one another to process their thinking, providing a natural way for them to become more comfortable with academic discourse. At the end of this unit, students were asked to individually write a letter to the student store recommending a price change. This was a way to assess their use of vocabulary and how their interactions contributed to their understanding of the material. It is also important for students to self-assess their understanding of the material. Processing techniques might include starting the period with vocabulary games, or having students reread their writing and underline the vocabulary words they used.

After completing a unit where students are dependent on communicating with group members, academic discourse is elevated in the classroom. Students cross the threshold of being nervous as they begin talking to their peers about their learning. Prior to implementing our problem-based learning curriculum, most student discourse consisted of students comparing answers. With practice, students find that discourse helps deepen their processing and validates their contributions to the group. As a teacher, modeling academic discourse is essential, but acknowledging students for their academic discourse is what makes it stick in the classroom.

Over the past year, we have established that increasing academic discourse also increases classroom engagement. When students are more likely to interact with their peers and take part in discussions, the long-term benefits of their understanding of the material are apparent in other math courses.

Editor's Note: Visit " Case Study: Reinventing a Public High School with Problem-Based Learning " to stay updated on Edutopia's coverage of Sammamish High School.

Module 1: Asking Questions

Academic communities, learning objectives.

• Identify defining characteristics of the academic discourse community
• Recognize the limitations and omissions of academic discourse

An academic discourse community has some features in common with other discourse communities, but it also has some distinctive characteristics.

As we’ve seen, we engage in research every day—yet not all research is academic research. By bringing the idea of research as systematic investigation together with the concept of discourse communities, we can begin to define academic research . Academic research is asking questions and investigating problems using the tools (and within the limits) of the academic discourse community .

The Academic Discourse Community

As you’ll recall, a discourse community is a group of people who share common goals and interests and communicate about these goals and interests in ways that are specific to the group. This is certainly the case with academics, who use specialized language toward a shared goal: the pursuit, exchange, and validation of knowledge. 

What are the features of academic discourse? How is academic discourse different from other discourse communities? Researcher Teresa Thonney analyzed articles in a number of peer-reviewed academic journals and identified a list of six shared characteristics of academic writing. These six characteristics (adapted here) provide a useful starting-point for thinking about the distinctive characteristics of academic discourse more broadly.

• In writing, academics frequently quote other experts (a process called “citation”). Academics usually expect claims to be anchored in (or at least in dialogue with) what other experts have said about the subject, rather than one’s own feelings or experience alone. Even the groundbreaking scholar Isaac Newton once wrote: “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
• In spoken academic discourse—for instance, class discussion—claims are usually grounded in some reference to a shared text or data set. If your class were discussing Haruki Murakami’s short story “Birthday Girl,” for instance, and you told a long story about something unrelated that happened on your birthday, it would be considered a distraction from, rather than a contribution to, the discussion. Likewise, if you said “birthdays are depressing!”, it wouldn’t be relevant to the discussion unless you showed how Murakami’s story portrays birthdays as depressing.
• The question of “what difference does this make?” or “who cares?” can be a tricky one for academics to answer. Many academic research projects are so specialized and focused that they can seem trivial or pointless to those outside the field. However, all academic writing needs to address the question of value and relevance. Academic writers do so within the terms and values of the academic discourse community—which may or may not overlap with the values of other communities. No matter how obviously useful and pressing or seemingly esoteric and trivial an academic work might be, its core value proposition is always the same: “ How does this enhance our understanding of _______ ?” This, then, relates to the central value shared by all of the academic discourse community: to pursue and exchange knowledge.
• “ Melocactus glaucescens is an endangered cactus highly valued for its ornamental properties. In vitro shoot production of this species provides a sustainable alternative to overharvesting from the wild; however, its propagation could be improved if the genetic regulation underlying its developmental processes were known.”
• In other words, this research helps us to understand how this cactus regrows itself, which in turn could help protect the cactus. Note that unlike, for instance, a non-profit organization devoted to protecting endangered cacti, this academic paper does not claim to help solve the problem directly. It does not offer a solution, but contributes to our understanding of the problem and thus, perhaps, to our ability to envision solutions.
• In some discourse communities, disagreement can lead to conflict or even violence. In academic discourse, disagreement is not only accepted; it’s encouraged. The scientific method, one of the foundational concepts of Western academic discourse, assumes that truth is found not in the theory that the most people agree with, but rather in the theory that hasn’t (yet) been disproven. It is said that there are no proven “facts” in science, just hypotheses that haven’t been disproven.
• Both in spoken and written academic discourse, this awareness and encouragement of disagreement leads to a striking number of “qualifier” words. Words like “it seems,” “appears to indicate,” “suggests that,” or “might lead us to conclude” are examples of “qualified” claims. This linguistic pattern, which acknowledges disagreement within the sentence itself, is a key feature of academic discourse. Where the trial lawyer would say: “The evidence proves without a doubt…” the academic would say “Existing evidence suggests…”
• By way of comparison, consider this version of the first sentence of the paragraph above: “I do not think that the frequent use of qualifying language in academic discourse means a lack of authority. I have noticed that academic writers use a number of language patterns to write and speak with authority…” In this version, the phrases “I do not think” and “I have noticed” mark the claim as the author’s opinion or personal experience. In the original version, however, the claim is made with authority : “The frequent use of qualifying language in academic discourse should not be mistaken for a lack of authority or conviction…” This is the kind of authority that tends to be adopted by academic writers.
• Given the characterization of academics as a discourse community, we’d expect a certain amount of specific vocabulary. As any first-year college student can tell you, there are a lot of new words and ideas to take in! The glossary of any biology, economics, or physics textbook is pages and pages long. Academics also have a habit of using familiar words in unfamiliar ways. Words like “reading,” “formal,” “significant,” and “criticism” may be used quite differently in academic discourse than in everyday speech.
• As we have seen, the voice of academic authority rests on the idea that the author or speaker is presenting a set of evidence, and that a reasonable person should agree with their conclusions. Thus it’s never enough to just confidently state an argument; the confidence must proceed from the evidence, which is presented in the body of the argument. We’ll cover this in more detail in the section on evidence.

These six characteristics of academic discourse form the basis of many of the lessons and advice in this course. From evidence and argument to citation to subject-specific vocabulary, learning about research writing is really about learning to attune your writing to the expectations of the academic discourse community.

Here, it is necessary to raise a few objections that may have already jumped out at you (especially if you’re thinking in terms of the spirit of disagreement):

• There is no single, monolithic academic discourse community. There are lots of different discourse communities within academic fields, institutions, and groups. Discourse communities will vary from school to school and from class to class—not to mention from country to country.
• Discourse communities change over time, and academics is no different. Things that were expected fifty years ago may not be expected now— and things that were accepted fifty years ago are unacceptable now. As people within and outside the community continue to put pressure on it to change and grow, it will keep changing!

So all of the information on this page needs to be read with the understanding that these are oversimplifications designed to help place academic discourse within the context of other discourse communities.

Though it is in no way unified or monolithic, academic discourse is certainly defined enough to be the object of important—and often justified—critique. In some cases, academic discourse is criticized for the way it excludes voices, ideas, experiences, and convictions that aren’t easily assimilated to its value system or patterns of thought.

What’s Left Out of the Academic Discourse Community?

In short, a lot. In an essay on going to college as a first-generation, working-class student, David Engen points out that the modes of expression expected within the academic discourse community were quite different from the ones he had grown up with:

Many students from working-class backgrounds strongly sense that their typical methods of expression and language use are not valued in the world of higher education. Verbal styles that at home allow the student to insert him or herself into conversation might have just the opposite effect at school. Being especially direct and to the point, for example, is not always valued in a collegiate environment. (Engen 256)

Here, Engen calls attention to the fact that the academic indirectness—the tendency to carefully qualify claims and statements—did not come naturally to someone used to speaking to the point. Nor did he find any validation for his natural directness: it was excluded from the values of this new discourse community.

In her essay “Language,” bell hooks makes a similar point about the exclusion of the communication styles with which she had grown up from academic discourse communities:

In academic circles, both in the sphere of teaching and that of writing, there has been little effort made to utilize black vernacular—or, for that matter, any language other than standard English. When I asked an ethnically diverse group of students in a course I was teaching on black women writers why we only heard standard English spoken in the classroom, they were momentarily rendered speechless. Though many of them were individuals for whom standard English was a second or third language, it had simply never occurred to them that it was possible to say something in another language, in another way. (hooks 171)

Importantly, the point of hooks’s essay is to suggest ways to bring a broader range of discourse communities and linguistic backgrounds into academic practice. Her goal is to change the academic discourse community, and not simply to accept the status quo: “We take the oppressor’s language and turn it against itself. We make our words a counter-hegemonic speech, liberating ourselves in language.” (175)

At various points in your academic journey, you may feel frustrated by the limitations—and even inequities—of the academic discourse community. You may feel like your authentic voice is being squashed by the insistence on a certain kind of neutral, indecisive language. Or you may feel that your life experience, political convictions, or religious faith are undervalued by the academic insistence on a certain kind of argument and evidence. You may be saying to yourself: “why am I learning MLA citation style when I want to be a dental hygienist?” or “Bad things are happening all over the world and instead of doing something about it I’m here writing a five page paper about Pablo Neruda’s ‘Ode to My Socks.'”

Faced with the intense demands of academic discourse, you may also be having doubts about yourself: “am I good enough,” or “am I smart enough” to participate in this particular academic discourse community?

Feelings of frustration and doubt are not only natural and valid, but also extremely common.

When you get frustrated, just remember: academic discourse isn’t the only game in town. It’s just one discourse community among many. Certainly not the most powerful, or the most expressive, or the most creative, or the most lucrative. The good news is, it can be learned! That’s what this course is about. Ultimately, the goal is to be able to bring your own values and experience, your own voice, into dialogue with the many perspectives of the academic discourse community. One of the ways you can do that, as we’ll see, is by thinking about the questions that are most important to you.

Beaufort, Anne. College Writing and Beyond: A New Framework for University Writing Instruction. United States, Utah State University Press, 2008.

Engen, David. “Invisible Identities: Notes on Class and Race”. Our Voices: Essays in Culture, Ethnicity, and Communication , edited by Alberto González and Yea-Wen Chen, Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. 253–259.

hooks, bell. “Language.” Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom . Routledge, 1994, pp.167-175.

Newton, Isaac. “Letter from Sir Isaac Newton to Robert Hooke”. 1675. Historical Society of Pennsylvania. https://digitallibrary.hsp.org/index.php/Detail/objects/9792

Thonney, Teresa. “Teaching the conventions of academic discourse.”  Teaching English in the Two Year College  38.4 (2011): 347.

Torres-Silva, Gabriela, et al. “Transcriptome analysis of Melocactus glaucescens (Cactaceae) reveals metabolic changes during in vitro shoot organogenesis induction.”  Frontiers in Plant Science,  12:697556 (2021) https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpls.2021.697556/full

• Discourse Communities. Provided by : The University of Mississippi. Located at : https://courses.lumenlearning.com/olemiss-writ250/chapter/discourse-communities-visiting-a-new-grove-tent/ . Project : Writing and Research in the Disciplines. License : CC BY: Attribution
• Community College Gathering. Provided by : U.S Department of Education. Located at : https://flic.kr/p/2mbmwFn . License : CC BY: Attribution
• Academic Communities. Provided by : Lumen Learning. License : CC BY: Attribution

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• Published: 02 March 2021

Research impact evaluation and academic discourse

• Marta Natalia Wróblewska   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-8575-5215 1 , 2  

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume  8 , Article number:  58 ( 2021 ) Cite this article

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The introduction of ‘impact’ as an element of assessment constitutes a major change in the construction of research evaluation systems. While various protocols of impact evaluation exist, the most articulated one was implemented as part of the British Research Excellence Framework (REF). This paper investigates the nature and consequences of the rise of ‘research impact’ as an element of academic evaluation from the perspective of discourse. Drawing from linguistic pragmatics and Foucauldian discourse analysis, the study discusses shifts related to the so-called Impact Agenda on four stages, in chronological order: (1) the ‘problematization’ of the notion of ‘impact’, (2) the establishment of an ‘impact infrastructure’, (3) the consolidation of a new genre of writing–impact case study, and (4) academics’ positioning practices towards the notion of ‘impact’, theorized here as the triggering of new practices of ‘subjectivation’ of the academic self. The description of the basic functioning of the ‘discourse of impact’ is based on the analysis of two corpora: case studies submitted by a selected group of academics (linguists) to REF2014 (no = 78) and interviews ( n  = 25) with their authors. Linguistic pragmatics is particularly useful in analyzing linguistic aspects of the data, while Foucault’s theory helps draw together findings from two datasets in a broader analysis based on a governmentality framework. This approach allows for more general conclusions on the practices of governing (academic) subjects within evaluation contexts.

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Introduction

The introduction of ‘research impact’ as an element of evaluation constitutes a major change in the construction of research evaluation systems. ‘Impact’, understood broadly as the influence of academic research beyond the academic sphere, including areas such as business, education, public health, policy, public debate, culture etc., has been progressively implemented in various systems of science evaluation—a trend observable worldwide (Donovan, 2011 ; Grant et al., 2009 ; European Science Foundation, 2012 ). Salient examples of attempts to systematically evaluate research impact include the Australian Research Quality Framework–RQF (Donovan, 2008 ) and the Dutch Standard Evaluation Protocol (VSNU–Association of Universities in the Netherlands, 2016 , see ‘societal relevance’).

The most articulated system of impact evaluation to date was implemented in the British cyclical ex post assessment of academic units, Research Excellence Framework (REF), as part of a broader governmental policy—the Impact Agenda. REF is the most-studied and probably the most influential impact evaluation system to date. It has been used as a model for analogous evaluations in other countries. These include the Norwegian Humeval exercise for the humanities (Research Council of Norway, 2017 , pp. 36–37, Wróblewska, 2019 ) and ensuing evaluations of other fields (Research Council of Norway, 2018 , pp. 32–34; Wróblewska, 2019 , pp. 12–16). REF has also directly inspired impact evaluation protocols in Hong-Kong (Hong Kong University Grants Committee, 2018 ) and Poland (Wróblewska, 2017 ). This study is based on data collected in the context of the British REF2014 but it advances a description of the ‘discourse of impact’ that can be generalized and applied to other national and international contexts.

Although impact evaluation is a new practice, a body of literature has been produced on the topic. This includes policy documents on the first edition of REF in 2014 (HEFCE, 2015 ; Stern, 2016 ) and related reports, be it commissioned (King’s College London and Digital Science, 2015 ; Manville et al., 2014 , 2015 ) or conducted independently (National co-ordinating center for public engagement, 2014 ). There also exists a scholarly literature which reflects on the theoretical underpinnings of impact evaluations (Gunn and Mintrom, 2016 , 2018 ; Watermeyer, 2012 , 2016 ) and the observable consequences of the exercise for academic practice (Chubb and Watermeyer, 2017 ; Chubb et al., 2016 ; Watermeyer, 2014 ). While these reports and studies mainly draw on the methods of philosophy, sociology and management, many of them also allude to changes related to language .

Several publications on impact drew attention to the process of meaning-making around the notion of ‘impact’ in the early stages of its existence. Manville et al. flagged up the necessity for the policy-maker to facilitate the development of common vocabulary to enable a broader ‘cultural shift’ (2015, pp. 16, 26. 37–38, 69). Power wrote of an emerging ‘performance discourse of impact’ (2015, p. 44) while Derrick ( 2018 ) looked at the collective process of defining and delimiting “the ambiguous object” of impact at the stage of panel proceedings. The present paper picks up these observations bringing them together in a unique discursive perspective.

Drawing from linguistic pragmatics and Foucauldian discourse analysis, the paper presents shifts related to the introduction of ‘impact’ as element of evaluation in four stages. These are, in chronological order: (1) the ‘problematisation’ of the notion of ‘impact’ in policy and its appropriation on a local level, (2) the creation of an impact infrastructure to orchestrate practices around impact, (3) the consolidation of a new genre of writing—impact case study, (4) academics’ uptake of the notion of impact and its progressive inclusion in their professional positioning.

Each of these stages is described using theoretical concepts grounded in empirical data. The first stage has to do with the process of ‘problematization’ of a previously non-regulated area, i.e., the process of casting research impact as a ‘problem’ to be addressed and regulated by a set of policy measures. The second stage took place when in rapid response to government policy, new procedures and practices were created within universities, giving rise to an impact ‘infrastructure’ (or ‘apparatus’ in the Foucauldian sense). The third stage is the emergence of a crucial element of the infrastructure—a new genre of academic writing—impact case study. I argue that engaging with the new genre and learning to write impact case studies was key in incorporating ‘impact’ into scholars’ narratives of ‘academic identity’. Hence, the paper presents new practices of ‘subjectivation’ as the fourth stage of incorporation of ‘impact’ into academic discourse. The four stages of the introduction of ‘impact’ into academic discourse are mutually interlinked—each step paves the way for the next.

Of the described four stages, only stage three focuses a classical linguistic task: the description of a new genre of text. The remaining three take a broader view informed by sociology and philosophy, focusing on discursive practices i.e., language used in social context. Other descriptions of the emergence of impact are possible—note for instance Power’s four-fold structure (Power, 2015 ), at points analogous to this study.

Theoretical framework and data

This study builds on a constructivist approach to social phenomena in assuming that language plays a crucial role in establishing and maintaining social practice. In this approach ‘discourse’ is understood as the production of social meaning—or the negotiation of social, political or cultural order—through the means of text and talk (Fairclough, 1989 , 1992 ; Fairclough et al., 1997 ; Gee, 2015 ).

Linguistic pragmatics and Foucauldian approaches to discourse are used to account for the changes related to the rise of ‘impact’ as element of evaluation and discourse on the macro and micro scale. In looking at the micro scale of every-day linguistic practices the analysis makes use of linguistic pragmatics, in particular concepts of positioning (Davies and Harré, 1990 ), stage (Goffman, 1969 ; Robinson, 2013 ), metaphor (Cameron, et al., 2009 ; Musolff, 2004 , 2012 ), as well as genre analysis (Swales, 1990 , 2011 ). Analyzing the macro scale, i.e., the establishment of the concept of ‘impact’ in policy and the creation of an impact infrastructure, it draws on selected concepts of Fouculadian governmentality theory (crucially ‘problematisation’, ‘apparatus’, ‘subjectivation’) (Foucault, 1980 , 1988 , 1990 ; Rose, 1999 , pp. ix–xiii).

While the toolbox of linguistic pragmatics is particularly useful in analyzing linguistic aspects of the datasets, Foucault’s governmental framework helps bring together findings from the two datasets in a broader analysis, allowing more general conclusions on the practices of governing (academic) subjects within evaluation frameworks. Both pragmatic and Foucauldian traditions of discourse analysis have been productively applied in the study of higher education contexts (e.g., Fairclough, 1993 , Gilbert and Mulkey, 1984 , Hyland, 2009 , Myers, 1985 , 1989 ; for an overview see Wróblewska and Angermuller, 2017 ).

The analysis builds on an admittedly heterogenous set of concepts, hailing from different traditions and disciplines. This approach allows for a suitably nuanced description of a broad phenomenon—the discourse of impact—studied here on the basis of two different datasets. To facilitate following the argument, individual theoretical and methodological concepts are defined where they are applied in the analysis.

The studied corpus consists of two datasets: a written and oral one. The written corpus includes 78 impact case studies (CSs) submitted to REF2014 in the discipline of linguistics Footnote 1 . Linguistics was selected as a discipline straddling the social sciences and humanities (SSH). SSH are arguably most challenged by the practice of impact evaluation as they have traditionally resisted subjection to economization and social accountability (Benneworth et al., 2016 ; Bulaitis, 2017 ).

The CSs were downloaded in pdf form from REF’s website: https://www.ref.ac.uk/2014/ . The documents have an identical structure, featuring basic information: name of institution, unit of assessment, title of CS and core content divided into five sections: (1) summary of impact, (2) underpinning research, (3) references to the research, (4) details of impact (5) sources to corroborate impact. Each CS is about 4 pages long (~2400 words). The written dataset (with a word-count of 173,474) was analyzed qualitatively using MAX QDA software with a focus on the generic aspect of the documents.

The oral dataset is composed of semi-structured interviews with authors of the studied CSs ( n  = 20) and other actors involved in the evaluation, including two policy-makers and three academic administrators Footnote 2 . In total, the 25 interviews, each around 60 min long, add up to around 25 h of recordings. The interviews were analyzed in two ways. Firstly, they were coded for themes and topics related to the evaluation process—this was useful for the description of impact infrastructure presented in step 2 of analysis. Secondly, they were considered as a linguistic performance and coded for discursive devices (irony, distancing, metaphor etc.)—this was the basis for findings related to the presentation of one’s ‘academic self’ which are the object of fourth step of analysis. The written corpus allows for an analysis of the functioning of the notion of ‘impact’ in the official, administrative discourse of academia, looking at the emergence of an impact infrastructure and the genre created for the description of impact. The oral dataset in turn sheds light on how academics relate to the notion of impact in informal settings, by focusing on metaphors and pragmatic markers of stage.

The discourse of impact

Problematization of impact.

The introduction of ‘impact’, a new element of evaluation accounting for 20% of the final result, was seen as a surprise and as a significant change in respect to the previous model of evaluation—the Research Assessment Exercise (Warner, 2015 ). The outline of an approach to impact evaluation in REF was developed on the government’s recommendation after a review of international practice in impact assessment (Grant et al., 2009 ). The adopted approach was inspired by the previously-created (but never implemented) Australian RQF framework (Donovan, 2008 ). A pilot evaluation exercise run in 2010 confirmed the viability of the case-study approach to impact evaluation. In July 2011 the Higher Education Council for England (HEFCE) published guidelines regulating the new assessment (HEFCE, 2011 ). The deadline for submissions was set for November 2013.

In the period between July 2011 and November 2013 HEFCE engaged in broad communication and training activities across universities, with the aim of explaining the concept of ‘impact’ and the rules which would govern its evaluation (Power, 2015 , pp. 43–48). Knowledge on the new element of evaluation was articulated and passed down to particular departments, academic administrative staff and individual researchers in a trickle-down process, as explained by a HEFCE policymaker in an account of the run-up to REF2014:

There was no master blue print! There were some ideas, which indeed largely came to pass. But in order to understand where we [HEFCE] might be doing things that were unhelpful and might have adverse outcomes, we had to listen. I was in way over one hundred meetings and talked to thousands of people! (…) [The Impact Agenda] is something that we are doing to universities. Actually, what we wanted to say is: ‘we are doing it with you, you’ve Footnote 3 got to own it’.

Int20, policymaker, example 1 Footnote 4

Due to the importance attributed to the exercise by managers of academic units and the relatively short time for preparing submissions, institutions were responsive to the policy developments. In fact, they actively contributed to the establishment and refinement of concepts related to impact. Institutional learning occurred to a large degree contemporarily to the consolidation of the policy and the refinement of the concepts and definitions related to impact. The initially open, undefined nature of ‘impact’ (“there was no master blue-print”) is described also in accounts of academics who participated in the many rounds of meetings and consultations. See example 2 below:

At that time, they [HEFCE] had not yet come up with this definition [of impact], not yet pinned it down, but they were trying to give an idea of what it was, to get feedback, to get a grip on it. (…) And we realised (…) they didn’t have any more of an idea of this than we did! It was almost like a fishing expedition. (…) I got a sense very early on of, you know, groping.

Int1, academic, example 2

The “pinning down” of an initially fuzzy concept and defining the rules which would come to govern its evaluation was just one aim of the process. The other one was to engage academics and affirm their active role in the policy-making. From an idea which came from outside of the British academic community (from the the government, the research councils) and originally from outside the UK (the Australian RQF exercise), a concept which was imposed on academics (“it is something that we are doing to universities”) the Impact Agenda was to become an accepted, embedded element of the academic life (“you’ve got to own it”). In this sense, the laboriousness of the process, both for the policy-makers and the academics involved, was a necessary price to be paid for the feeling of “ownership” among the academic community. Attitudes of academics, initially quite negative (Chubb et al., 2016 , Watermeyer, 2016 ), changed progressively, as the concept of impact became familiarized and adapted to the pre-existing realities of academic life, as recounted by many of the interviewees, e.g.,:

I think the resentment died down relatively quickly. There was still some resistance. And that was partly academics recognising that they had to [take part in the exercise], they couldn’t ignore it. Partly, the government and the research council has been willing to tweak, amend and qualify the initial very hard-edged guidelines and adapt them for the humanities. So, it was two-way process, a dialogue.

Int16, academic, example 3

The announcement of the final REF regulations (HEFCE, 2011 ) was the climax of the long process of making ‘impact’ into a thinkable and manageable entity. The last iteration of the regulations constituted a co-creation of various actors (initial Australian policymakers of the RQF, HEFCE employees, academics, impact professionals, universities, professional organizations) who had contributed to it at different stages (in many rounds of consultations, workshops, talks and sessions across the country). ‘Impact’ as a notion was ‘talked into being’ in a polyphonic process (Angermuller, 2014a , 2014b ) of debate, critique, consultation (“listening”, “getting feedback”) and adaptation (“tweaking”, “changing”, “amending hard-edged guidelines”) also in view of the pre-existing conditions of academia such as the friction between the ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ sciences (as mentioned in example 3). In effect, impact was constituted as an object of thought, and an area of academic activity begun to emerge around it.

The period of defining ‘impact’ as a new, important notion in academic discourse in the UK, roughly between July 2011 and November 2013, can be conceptualized in terms of the Foucauldian notion of ‘problematization’. This concept describes how spaces, areas of activity, persons, behaviors or practices become targeted by government, separated from others, and cast as ‘problems’ to be addressed with a set of techniques and regulations. ‘Problematisation’ is the moment when a notion “enters into the play of true and false, (…) is constituted as an object of thought (whether in the form of moral reflection, scientific knowledge, political analysis, etc.)” (Foucault, 1988 , p. 257), when it “enters into the field of meaning” (Foucault, 1984 , pp. 84–86). The problematization of an area triggers not only the establishment of new notions and objects but also of new practices and institutions. In consequence, the areas in question become subjugated to a new (political, administrative, financial) domination. This eventually shapes the way in which social subjects conceive of their world and of themselves. But a ‘problematisation’, however influential, cannot persist on its own. It requires an overarching structure in the form of an ‘apparatus’ which will consolidate and perpetuate it.

Impact infrastructure

Soon after the publication of the evaluation guidelines for REF2014, and still during the phase of ‘problematisation’ of impact, universities started collecting data on ‘impactful’ research conducted in their departments and recruiting authors of potential CSs which could be submitted for evaluation. The winding and iterative nature of the process of problematization of ‘impact’ made it difficult for research managers and researchers to keep track of the emerging knowledge around impact (official HEFCE documentation, results of the pilot evaluation, FAQs, workshops and sessions organized around the country, writings published in paper and online). At the stage of collecting drafts of CSs it was still unclear what would ‘count’ as impact and what evidence would be required. Hence, there emerged a need for specific procedures and specialized staff who would prepare the REF submissions.

At most institutions, specific posts were created for employees preparing impact submissions for REF2014. These were both secondment positions such as ‘impact lead’, ‘impact champion’ and full-time ones such as impact officer, impact manager. These professionals soon started organizing between themselves at meetings and workshops. Administrative units focused on impact (such as centers for impact and engagement, offices for impact and innovation) were created at many institutions. A body of knowledge on impact evaluation was soon consolidated, along with a specific vocabulary (‘a REF-able piece of research’, ‘pathways to impact’, ‘REF-readiness’ etc.) and sets of resources. Impact evaluation gave raise to the creation of a new type of specialized university employee, who in turn contributed to turning the ‘generation of impact’, as well as the collection and presentation of related data into a veritable field of professional expertize.

In order to ensure timely delivery of CSs to REF2014, institutions established fixed procedures related to the new practice of impact evaluation (periodic monitoring of impact, reporting on impact-related activities), frames (schedules, document templates), forms of knowledge transfer (workshops on impact generation or on writing in the CS genre), data systems and repositories for logging and storing impact-related data, and finally awards and grants for those with achievements (or potential) related to impact. Consultancy companies started offering commercial services focused on research impact, catering to universities and university departments but also to governments and research councils outside the UK looking at solutions for impact evaluation. There is even an online portal with a specific focus on showcasing researchers’ impact (Impact Story).

In consequence, impact became institutionalized as yet another “box to be ticked” on the list of academic achievements, another component of “academic excellence”. Alongside burdens connected to reporting on impact and following regulations in the area, there came also rewards. The rise of impact as a new (or newly-problematised) area of academic life opened up uncharted areas to be explored and opportunities for those who wished to prove themselves. These included jobs for those who had acquired (or could claim) expertize in the area of impact (Donovan, 2017 , p. 3) and research avenues for those studying higher education and evaluation (after all, entirely new evaluation practices rarely emerge, as stressed by Power, 2015 , p. 43). While much writing on the Impact Agenda highlights negative attitudes towards the exercise (Chubb et al., 2016 ; Sayer, 2015 ), equally worth noting are the opportunities that the establishment of a new element of the exercise opened. It is the energy of all those who engage with the concept (even in a critical way) that contributes to making it visible, real and robust.

The establishment of a specialized vocabulary, of formalized requirements and procedures, the creation of dedicated impact-related positions and departments, etc. contribute to the establishment of what can be described as an ‘impact infrastructure’ (comp. Power, 2015 , p. 50) or in terms of Foucauldian governmentality theory as an ‘apparatus’ Footnote 5 . In Foucault’s terminology, ‘apparatus’ refers to a formation which encompasses the entirety of organizing practices (rituals, mechanisms, technologies) but also assumptions, expectations and values. It is the system of relations established between discursive and non-discursive elements as diverse as “institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions” (Foucault, 1980 , p. 194). An apparatus servers a specific strategic function—responding to an urgent need which arises in a concrete time in history—for instance, regulating the behavior of a population.

There is a crucial discursive element to all the elements of the ‘impact apparatus’. While the creation of organizational units and jobs, the establishment of procedures and regulations, participation in meetings and workshops are no doubt ‘hard facts’ of academic life, they are nevertheless brought about and made real in discursive acts of naming, defining, delimiting and evaluating. The aim of the apparatus was to support the newly-established problematization of impact. It did so by operating on many levels: first of all, and most visibly, newly-established procedures enabled a timely and organized submission to the upcoming REF. Secondly, the apparatus guided the behavior of social actors. It did so not only through directive methods (enforcing impact-related requirements) but also through nurturing attitudes and dispositions which are necessary for the notion of impact to take root in academia (for instance via impact training delivered to early-career scholars).

Interviewed actors involved in implementing the policy in institutions recognized their role in orchestrating collective learning. An interviewed impact officer stated:

My feeling is that ultimately my post should not exist. In ten or fifteen years’ time, impact officers should have embedded the message [about impact] firmly enough that they [researchers] don’t need us anymore.

Int7, impact officer, example 4

A similar vision was evoked by a HEFCE policymaker who was asked if the notion of impact had become embedded in academic institutions:

I hope [after the next edition of REF] we will be able to say that it has become embedded. I think the question then will be “have we done enough in terms of case studies? Do we need something very much lighter-touch?” “Do we need anything at all?”—that’s a question. (…) If [impact] is embedded you don’t need to talk about it.

Int20, policy-maker, example 5

Rather than being an aim in itself, the Impact Agenda is a means of altering academic culture so that institutions and individual researchers become more mindful of the societal impacts of their research. The instillment of a “new impact culture” (see Manville et al., 2014 , pp. 24–29) would ensure that academic subjects consider the question of ‘impact’ even outside of the framework of REF. The “culture shift” is to occur not just within institutions but ultimately within the subjects—it is in them that the notion of ‘impact’ has to become embedded. Hence, the final purpose of the apparatus would be to obscure the origins of the notion of ‘impact’ and the related practices, neutralizing the notion itself, and giving a guise of necessity to an evaluative reality which in fact is new and contingent.

The genre of impact case study as element of infrastructure

In this section two questions are addressed: (1) what are the features of the genre (or what is it like?) and (2) what are the functions of the genre (or what does it do? what vision of research does it instil?). In addressing the first question, I look at narrative patterns, as well as lexical and grammatical features of the genre. This part of the study draws on classical genre analysis (Bhatia, 1993 ; Swales, 1998 ) Footnote 6 . The second question builds on the recognition, present in discourse studies since the 1970s’, that genres are not merely classes of texts with similar properties, but also veritable ‘dispositives of communication’. A genre is a means of articulation of legitimate speech; it does not just represent facts or reflect ideologies, it also acts on and alters the context in which it operates (Maingueneau, 2010 , pp. 6–7). This awareness has engendered broader sociological approaches to genre which include their pragmatic functioning in institutional realities (Swales, 1998 ).

The genre of CS differs from other academic genres in that it did not emerge organically, but was established with a set of guidelines and a document template at a precise moment in time. The genre is partly reproductive, as it recycles existing patterns of academic texts, such as journal article, grant application, annual review, as well as case study templates applied elsewhere. The studied corpus is strikingly uniform, testifying to an established command of the genre amongst submitting authors. Identical expressions are used to describe impact across the corpus. Only very rarely is non-standard vocabulary used (e.g., “horizontal” and “vertical” impact rather then “reach” and “significance” of impact). This coherence can be contrasted with a much more diversified corpus of impact CSs submitted in Norway to an analogous exercise (Wróblewska, 2019 ). The rapid consolidation of the genre in British academia can be attributed to the perceived importance of impact evaluation exercise, which lead to the establishment of an impact infrastructure, with dedicated employees tasked with instilling the ‘culture of impact’.

In its nature, the CS is a performative, persuasive genre—its purpose is to convince the ‘ideal readers’ (the evaluators) of the quality of the underpinning research and the ‘breadth and significance’ of the described impact. The main characteristics of the genre stem directly from its persuasive aim. These are discussed below in terms of narrative patterns, and grammatical and lexical features.

Narrative patterns

On the level of narrative, there is an observable reliance on a generic pattern of story-telling frequent in fiction genres, such as myths or legends, namely the Situation-Problem–Response–Evaluation (SPRE) structure (also known as the Problem-Solution pattern, see Hoey, 1994 , 2001 pp. 123–124). This is a well-known narrative which follows the SPRE pattern: a mountain ruled by a dragon (situation) which threats the neighboring town (problem) is sieged by a group of heroes (response), to lead to a happy ending or a new adventure (evaluation). Compare this to an example of the SPRE pattern in a sample impact narrative from the studied corpus:

Mosetén is an endangered language spoken by approximately 800 indigenous people (…) (SITUATION). Many Mosetén children only learn the majority language, Spanish (PROBLEM). Research at [University] has resulted in the development of language materials for the Mosetenes. (…) (RESPONSE). It has therefore had a direct influence in avoiding linguistic and cultural loss. (EVALUATION).

CS40828 Footnote 7

The SPRE pattern is complemented by patterns of Further Impact and Further Corroboration. The first one allows elaborating the narrative, e.g., by showing additional (positive) outcomes, so that the impact is not presented as an isolated event, but rather as the beginning of a series of collaborations, e.g.,:

The research was published in [outlet] (…). This led to an invitation from the United Nations Environment Programme for [researcher](FURTHER IMPACT).

Patterns of ‘further impact’ are often built around linking words, such as: “X led to” ( n  = 78) Footnote 8 , “as a result” ( n in the corpus =31), “leading to” ( n  = 24), “resulting in” ( n  = 13), “followed” (“X followed Y”– n  = 14). Figure 1 below shows a ‘word tree’ for a frequent linking structure “led to”. The size of the terms in the diagram represents frequencies of terms in the corpus. Reading the word tree from left to right enables following typical sentence structures built around the ‘led to’ phrase: research led to an impact (fundamental change/development/establishment/production of…); impact “led to” further impact.

Word tree with string ‘led to'. This word tree with string ‘led to’ was prepared with MaxQDA software. It visualises a frequent sentence structure where research led to impact (fundamental change/ development/ establishment/ production of…) or otherwise how impact “led to” further impact.

The ‘Further Corroboration’ pattern provides additional information which strengthens the previously provided corroborative material:

(T)he book has been used on the (…) course rated outstanding by Ofsted, at the University [Name](FURTHER CORROBORATION).

Grammatical and lexical features

Both on a grammatical and lexical level, there is a visible focus on numbers and size. In making the point on the breadth and significance of impact, CS authors frequently showcase (high) numbers related to the research audience (numbers of copies sold, audience sizes, downloads but also, increasingly, tweets, likes, Facebook friends and followers). Adjectives used in the CSs appear frequently in the superlative or with modifiers which intensify them: “Professor [name] undertook a major Footnote 9 ESRC funded project”; “[the database] now hosts one of the world’s largest and richest collections (…) of corpora”; “work which meets the highest standards of international lexicographical practice”; “this experience (…) is extremely empowering for local communities”, “Reach: Worldwide and huge ”.

Use of ‘positive words’ constitutes part of the same phenomenon. These appear often in the main narrative on research and impact, and even more frequently in quoted testimonials. Research is described in the CSs as being new, unique and important with the use of words such as “innovative” ( n  = 29), “influential” ( n  = 16), “outstanding” ( n  = 12), “novel” ( n  = 10), “excellent” ( n  = 8), “ground-breaking” ( n  = 7), “tremendous” ( n  = 4), “path-breaking” ( n  = 2), etc. The same qualities are also rendered descriptively, with the use of words that can be qualified as boosters e.g., “[the research] has enabled a complete rethink of the relationship between [areas]”; “ vitally important [research]”.

Novelty of research is also frequently highlighted with the adjective “first” appearing in the corpus 70 times Footnote 10 . While in itself “first” is not positive or negative, it carries a big charge in the academic world where primacy of discovery is key. Authors often boast about having for the first time produced a type of research—“this was the first handbook of discourse studies written”…, studied a particular area—“This is the first text-oriented discourse analytic study”…, compiled a type of data—“[We] provid[ed] for the first time reliable nationwide data”; “[the] project created the first on-line database of…”, or proven a thesis: “this research was the first to show that”…

Another striking lexical characteristic of the CSs is the presence of fixed expressions in the narrative on research impact. I refer to these as ‘impact speak’. There are several collocations with ‘impact’, the most frequent being “impact on” ( n  = 103) followed by the ‘type’ of impact achieved (impact on knowledge), area/topic (impact on curricula) or audience (Impact on Professional Interpreters). This collocation often includes qualifiers of impact such as “significant”, “wide”, “primary”,“secondary”, “broader”, “key”, and boosters: great, positive, wide, notable, substantial, worldwide, major, fundamental, immense etc. Impact featured in the corpus also as a transitive verb ( n  = 22) in the forms “impacted” and “impacting”—e.g., “[research] has (…) impacted on public values and discourse”. This is interesting, as use of ‘impact’ as a verb is still often considered colloquial. Verb collocations with ‘impact’ are connected to achieving influence (“lead to..”, “maximize…”, “deliver impact”) and proving the existence and quality of impact (“to claim”, “to corroborate” impact, “to vouch for” impact, “to confirm” impact, to “give evidence” for impact). Another salient collocation is “pathways to impact” ( n  = 14), an expression describing channels of interacting with the public, in the corpus occasionally shortened to just “pathways” e.g., “The pathways have been primarily via consultancy”. This phrase has most likely made its way to the genre of CS from the Research Councils UK ‘Pathways to Impact’ format introduced as part of grant applications in 2009 (discontinued in early 2020).

On a syntactic level, CSs are rich in parallel constructions of enumeration, for instance: “ (t)ranslators, lawyers, schools, colleges and the wider public of Welsh speakers are among (…) users [of research]”; “the research has benefited a broad, international user base including endangered language speakers and community members, language activists, poets and others ”; [the users of the research come] “from various countries including India, Turkey, China, South Korea, Venezuela, Uzbekistan, and Japan ”. Listing, alongside providing figures, is one of the standard ways of signaling the breadth and significance of impact. Both lists and superlatives support the persuasive function of the genre. In terms of verbal forms, passive verbs are clearly favored and personal pronouns (“I, we”) are avoided: “research was conducted”, “advice was provided”, “contracts were undertaken”.

Vision of research promoted by the genre of CS

Impact CS is a new, influential genre which affects its academic context by celebrating and inviting a particular vision of successful research and impact. It sets a standard for capturing and describing a newly-problematized academic object. This standard will be a point of reference for future authors of CSs. Hence, it is worth taking a look at the vision on research it instills.

The SPRE pattern used in the studied CSs favors a vision of research that is linear: work proceeds from research question to results without interference. The Situation and Problem elements are underplayed in favor of elaborate descriptions of the researchers’ ‘Reactions’ (research and outreach/impact activities) and flattering ‘Evaluations’ (descriptions of effects of the research and data supporting these claims). Most narratives are devoid of challenges (the ‘Problem’ element is underplayed, possible drawbacks and failures in the research process are mentioned sporadically). Furthermore, narratives are clearly goal-oriented: impact is shown as included in the research design from the beginning (e.g., impact is frequently mentioned already in section 2 ‘Underpinning research’, rather than the latter one ‘Details of the impact’). Elements of chance, luck, serendipity in the research process are erased—this is reinforced by the presence of patterns of ‘further proof’ and ‘further corroboration’. As such, the bulk of studied CSs channel a vision of what is referred to in Science Studies as ‘normal’ (deterministic, linear) science (Kuhn, 1970 , pp. 10–42). From a purely literary perspective this makes for rather dull narratives: “fairy-tales of researcher-heroes… but with no dragons to be slain” (Selby, 2016 ).

The few CSs which do discuss obstacles in the research process or in securing impact stand out as strikingly diverse from the rest of the corpus. Paradoxically, while apparently ‘weakening’ the argumentation, they render it more engaging and convincing. This effect has been observed also in in an analogous corpus of Norwegian CSs which tend to problematize the pathway from research to impact to a much higher degree (Wróblewska, 2019 , pp. 34–35).

The lexical and grammatical features of the CSs—the proliferation of ‘positive words’, including superlatives, and the adjective “first”— contribute to an idealization of the research process. The documents channel a vision of academia where there is no place for simply ‘good’ research—all CSs seem based on ‘excellent’ and ‘ground-breaking’ projects. The quality of research underpinning impact is recognized in CSs in a straightforward, simplistic way (quotation numbers, peer reviewed papers, publications in top journals, submission to REF), which contributes to normalizing the view of research quality as easily measurable. Similarly, testimonials related to impact are not all equal. Sources of corroboration cited in CSs were carefully selected to appear prestigious and trustworthy. Testimonials and statements from high-ranking officials (but also ‘celebrities’ such as famous intellectuals or political leaders) were particularly sought-after. The end effect reinforces a solidified vision of a hierarchy of worth and trustworthiness in academia.

The prevalence of impersonal verbal forms suggests an de-personalized vision of the research process (“work was conducted”, “papers were published”, “evidence was given…”), where individual factors such as personal aspirations, constraints or ambitions are effaced. The importance given to numbers contributes to a strengthening of a ‘quantifiable’ idea of impact. This is in line with a trend observed in academic writing in general – the inflation of ‘positive words’ (boosters and superlatives) (Vinkers et al., 2015 ). This tendency is amplified in the genre of CS, particularly in its British iteration. In a Norwegian corpus claims to excellence of research and breadth and significance of impact were significantly more modest (Wróblewska, 2019 , pp. 28–30).

The genre of impact CS is a core binding component of the impact infrastructure: all the remaining elements of this formation are mutually connected by a common aim – the generation of CSs. While the CS genre, together with the encompassing impact infrastructure, is vested with a seductive/coercive force, the subjects whose work it represents and who produce it take different positions in its face.

Academics’ positioning towards the Impact Agenda

Academics position themselves towards the concept of impact in many explicit and implicit ways. ‘Positioning’ is understood here as performance-based claims to identity and subjectivity (Davies and Harré, 1990 , Harré and Van Langenhove, 1998 ). Rejecting the idea of stable “inherent” identities, positioning theorists stress how different roles are invoked and enacted in a continuous game of positioning (oneself) and being positioned (by others). Positioning in academic contexts may take the form of indexing identities such as “professor”, “linguist”, “research manager”, “SSH scholar”, “intellectual”, “maverick” etc. (Angermuller, 2013 ; Baert, 2012 , Hamann, 2016 , Hah, 2019 , 2020 ). Also many daily interactions which do not include explicit identity claims involve subject positioning, as they carry value judgments, thereby also evoking counter-statements and colliding social contexts (Tirado and Galvaz, 2008 , pp. 32–45).

My analysis draws attention to the process of incorporating impact into academic subjectivities. I look firstly at the mechanics of academics’ positioning towards impact: the game of opposite discursive acts of distancing and endorsement. Academics reject the notion of ‘impact’ by ironizing, stage management and use of metaphors. Conversely, they may actively incorporate impact into their presentation of academic ‘self’. This discursive engagement with the notion of impact can be described as ‘subjectivation’, i.e., the process whereby subjects re(establish) themselves in relation to the grid of power/knowledge in which they function (in this case the emergent ‘impact infrastructure’).

The relatively high response rate of this study (~50%) and the visible eagerness of respondents to discuss the question of impact suggest an emotional response of academics to the topic of impact evaluation. Yet, respondents visibly struggled with the notion of ‘impact’, often distancing themselves from it through discursive devices, the most salient being ironizing, use of metaphors and stage management.

Ironizing the notion of impact

In many cases, before proceeding to explain their attitude to impact, interviewed academics elaborated on the notion of impact, explaining how the notion applied to their discipline or field and what it meant for them personally. This often meant rejecting the official definition of impact or redefining the concept. In excerpt 6, the interviewee picks up the notion:

Impact… I don’t even like the word! (…) It sounds [like] a very aggressive word, you know, impact, impact ! I don’t want to imp act ! What you want, and what has happened with [my research] really is… more of a dialogue.

Int21, academic, example 6

Another respondent brought up the notion of impact when discussing ethical challenges arising from public dissemination of research.

When you manage to go through that and navigate successfully, and keep producing research, to be honest, that’s impact for me.

Int9, academic, example 7

An analogous distinction was made by a third respondent who discussed the effect of his work on an area of professional activity. While, as he explained, this application of his research has been a source of personal satisfaction, he refused to describe his work in terms of ‘impact’. He stressed that the type of influence he aims for does not lend itself to producing a CS (is not ‘REF-able’):

That’s not impact in the way this government wants it! Cause I have no evidence. I just changed someone’s view. Is that impact? Yes, for me it is. But it is not impact as understood by the bloody REF.

Int3, academic, example 8

These are but three examples of many in the studied corpus where speakers take up the notion of impact to redefine or nuance it, often juxtaposing it with adjacent notions of public engagement, dissemination, outreach, social responsibility, activism etc. A previous section highlighted how the definition of impact was collectively constructed by a community in a process of problematization. The above-cited examples illustrate the reverse of this phenomenon—namely, how individual social actors actively relate to an existing notion in a process of denying, re-defining, and delimiting.

These opposite tendencies of narrowing down and again widening a definition are in line with the theory of the double role of descriptions in discourse. Definitions are both constructions and constructive —while they are effects of discourse, they can also become ‘building blocks’ for ideas, identities and attitudes (Potter, 1996 , p. 99). By participating in impact-related workshops academics ‘reify’ the existing, official definition by enacting it within the impact infrastructure. Fragments cited above exemplify the opposite strategy of undermining the adequacy of the description or ‘ironizing’ the notion (Ibid, p.107). The tension between reifying and ironizing points to the winding, conflictual nature of the process of accepting and endorsing the new ‘culture of impact’. A recognition of the multiple meanings given to the notion of ‘impact’ by policy-makers, academic managers and scholars may caution us in relation to studies on attitudes towards impact which take the notion at face value.

Respondents nuanced the notion of impact also through the use of metaphors. In discourse analysis metaphors are seen in not just as stylistic devices but as vehicles for attitudes and values (Mussolf, 2004 , 2012 ). Many of the respondents make remarks on the ‘realness’ or ‘seriousness’ of the exercise, emphasizing its conventional, artificial nature. Interviewees admitted that claims made in the CSs tend to be exaggerated. At the same time, they stressed that this was in line with the convention of the genre, the nature of which was clear for authors and panelists alike. The practice of impact evaluation was frequently represented metaphorically as a game. See excerpt 9 below:

To be perfectly honest, I view the REF and all of this sort of regulatory mechanisms as something of a game that everybody has to play. The motivation [to submit to REF] was really: if they are going to make us jump through that hoop, we are clever enough to jump through any hoops that any politician can set.

Int14, academic, example 9

Regarding the relation of the narratives in the CSs to truth see example 10:

[A CS] is creative stuff. Given that this is anonymous, I can say that it’s just creative fiction. I wouldn’t say we [authors of CSs] lie, because we don’t, but we kind of… spin. We try to show a reality which, by some stretch of imagination is there. (It’s) a truth. I’m not lying. Can it be shown in different ways? Yes, it can, and then it would be possibly less. But I choose, for obvious reasons, to say that my external funding is X million, which is a truth.

Int3, academic, example 10

The metaphors of “playing a game”, “jumping through hoops” suggest a competition which one does not enter voluntarily (“everybody has to play it”) while those of “creative fiction”, “spinning”, presenting “ a truth” point to an element of power struggle over defining the rules of the game. Doing well in the exercise can mean outsmarting those who establish the framework (politicians) by “performing” particularly well. This can be achieved by eagerly fulfilling the requirements of the genre of CS, and at the same time maintaining a disengaged position from the “regulatory mechanism” of the impact infrastructure.

Stage management

Academics’ positioning towards impact plays out also through management of ‘stage’ of discursive performance, often taking the form of frontstage and backstage markers (in the sense of Goffman’s dramaturgy–1969, pp. 92–122). For instance, references to the confidential nature of the interview (see example 10 above) or the expression “to be perfectly honest” (example 9), are backstage markers. Most of the study’s participants have authored narratives about their work in the strict, formalized genre of CS, thereby performing on the Goffmanian ‘front stage’ for an audience composed of senior management, REF panelists and, ultimately, perhaps “politicians”, “the government”. However, when speaking on the ‘back stage’ context of an anonymous interview, many researchers actively reject the accuracy of the submitted CSs as representations of their work. Many express a nuanced, often critical, view on impact.

Respondents frequently differentiate between the way they perceive ‘impact’ on different ‘levels’, or from the viewpoint of their different ‘roles’ (scholar, research manager, citizen…). One academic can hold different (even contradictory) views on the assessment of impact. Someone who strongly criticizes the Impact Agenda as an administrative practice might be supportive of ‘impact’ on a personal level or vice versa. See the answer of a linguist asked whether ‘impact’ enters into play when he assesses the work of other academics:

When I look at other people’s work work as a linguist, I don’t worry about that stuff. (…) As an administrator, I think that linguistics, like many sciences, has neglected the public. (…) At some point, when we would be talking about promotion (…) I would want to take a look at the impact of their work. (…) And that would come into my thinking in different times.

Int13, academic, example 11

Interestingly, in the studied corpus there isn’t a simple correlation between conducting research which easily ‘lends itself to impact’ and a positive overall attitude to impact evaluation.

Subjectivation

The most interesting data excerpts in this study are perhaps the ones where respondents wittingly or unwittingly expose their hesitations, uncertainties and struggles in positioning themselves towards the concept of impact. In theoretical terms, these can be interpreted as symptoms of an ongoing process of ‘subjectivation’.

‘Subjectivation’ is another concept rooted in Foucauldian governmentality theory. According to Foucault, individuals come to the ‘truth’ about their subjectivity by actively relating to a pre-existent set of codes, patterns, rules and rituals suggested by their culture or social group (Castellani, 1999 , pp. 257–258; Foucault, 1988 , p. 11). The term ‘subjectivation’ refers to the process in which an individual establishes oneself in relation to the grid of power/knowledge in which they function. This includes actions subjects take on their performance, competences, attitudes, self-esteem, desires etc. in order to improve, regulate or reform themselves (Dean, 1999 , p. 20; Lemke, 2002 ; Rose, 1999 , p. xii).

Academics often distance themselves from the assessment exercise, as shown in previous sections. And yet, the data hints that having taken part in the evaluation and engaged with the impact infrastructure was not without influence on the way they present their research, also in nonofficial, non-evaluative contexts, such as the research interview. This effect is visible in vocabulary choices—interviewees routinely spoke about ‘pathways to impact’, ‘impact generation’, ‘REF-ability’ etc. ‘Impact speak’ has made its way into every-day, casual academic conversations. Beyond changes to vocabulary, there is a more deep-running process—the discursive work of reframing one’s research in view of the evaluation exercise and in its terms. Many respondents seemed to adjust the presentation of their research, its focus and aims, when the topic of REF surfaced in the exchange. Interestingly, such shifts occurred even in the case of respondents who did not submit to the exercise, for instance because they were already retired, or because they refused to take part in it. For those who have submitted CSs to REF, the effect of having re-framed the narrative of their research in this new genre often had a tremendous effect.

Below presented is the example of a scholar who did not initially volunteer to submit a CS, and was reluctant to take part when she was encouraged by a supervisor. During the interview the respondent distanced herself from the exercise and the concept of impact through the discursive devices of ironizing, metaphors, stage management, and humor. The respondent was consistently critical towards impact in course of the interview. Therefore the researcher expected a firm negative answer to the final question: “did the exercise affect your perception of your work?”. See excerpt 13 below for her the respondent’s somewhat surprising answer.

Do you know what? It did, it did, it did. Almost a kind of a massive influence it had. Maybe this is the answer that you didn’t see coming ((laughing)). (…) It did [have an influence] but maybe from a different route as for people who were signed up for [the REF submission] from the outset. (…) When I saw this [CS narrative] being shaped up and people [who gave testimonies] I kind of thought: goodness me! And there were other moving things.

Int21, academic, example 13

Through the preparation of the CS and particularly through familiarizing herself with the underpinning testimonials, the respondent gained greater awareness of an area of practice which was influenced by her research. The interviewee’s attitude changed not only in the course of the evaluation exercise, but also—as if mirroring this process—during the interview. In both cases, elements which were up to that moment implicit (the response of end-users of the work, the researcher’s own emotional response to the exercise and to the written-up narrative of her impact) were made explicit. It is the process of recounting one’s story in a different framework, according to other norms and values (and in a different genre) that triggers the process of subjectivation. This example of a change of attitude in an initially reluctant subject demonstrates the difficulty in opposing the overwhelming force of the impact infrastructure, particularly in view of the (sometimes unexpected) rewards that it offers.

Many respondents found taking part in the REF submission—including the discursive work on the narrative of their research—an exhausting experience. In some cases however, the process of reshaping one’s academic identity triggered by the Agenda was a welcome development. Several interviewees claimed that the exercise valorized their extra-academic involvement which previously went unnoticed at their department. These scholars embraced the genre of CS as an opportunity to present their impact-related activities as an inherent part of their academic work. One academic stated:

At last, I can take my academic identity and my activist identity and roll them up into one.

Int11, academic, example 14

Existing studies have focused on situating academics’ attitudes towards the Impact Agenda on a positive-negative scale (e.g., Chubb et al., 2016 ), and studied divergences depending on career stage or disciplinary affiliation etc. (Chikoore, 2016 ; Chikoore and Probets, 2016 ; Weinstein et al., 2019 ). My data shows that there are many dimensions to each academic’s view of impact. Scholars have complex (sometimes even contradictory) views on ‘impact’ and the discursive work in incorporating impact into a coherent academic ‘self’ is ongoing. While an often overwhelming ‘impact infrastructure’ looms over professional discursive positioning practices, academic subjects are by no means passive recipients of governmental new-managerial policies. On the contrary, they are agents actively involved in accepting, rejecting and negotiating them on a local level—both in front-stage and back-stage contexts.

Looking at the front stage, most CSs seem compliant in their eagerness to demonstrate impact in all its breadth and significance. The documents showcase large numbers and data once considered trivial in the academic context (Facebook likes, Twitter followers, endorsement of celebrities…) and faithfully follow the policy documents in adopting ‘impact speak’. Interviews with academics paint a different picture: the respondents may be playing according to the rules of the evaluation “game”, but they are playing consciously , often in an emotionally detached, distanced manner. Other scholars adjust to the regulations, but not in the name of compliance, but in view of an alignment between the goals of the Agenda and their personal ones. Finally, some academics perceive the evaluation of impact as an opportunity to re-position themselves professionally or re-claim areas of activity which were long considered non-essential for an academic career, like public engagement, outreach and activism.

Concluding remarks

The initial, dynamic phases of the introduction of impact to British academia represent, in terms of Foucauldian theory, the phase of ‘emergence’. This notion draws attention to the moment when discursive concepts (‘impact’, ‘impact case study’…) surface and consolidate. It is in these terms that the previously non-regulated area of academic activity will be thereon described, assessed, evaluated. New notions, definitions, procedures related to impact and the genre of CS will continue to circulate, emerging in other evaluation exercises, at other institutions, in other countries.

The stage of emergence is characterized by a struggle of forces, an often violent conflict between opposing ideas—“it is their eruption, the leap from the wings to centre stage” (Foucault, 1984 , p. 84). The shape that an emergent idea will eventually take is the effect of clashes of these forces and it does not fully depend on any of them. Importantly, emergence is merely “the entry of forces” (p. 84), and “not the final term of historical development” (p. 83). For Foucault, a concept, in its inception, is essentially an empty word, which addresses the needs of a field that is being problematized and satisfies the powers which target it. A problematization (of an object, practice, area of activity) is a response to particular desires or problems—these constitute an instigation, but do not determine the shape of the problematization. As Foucault urges “to one single set of difficulties, several responses can be made” (2003, p. 24).

With the emergence of the Impact Agenda, an area of activity which has always existed (the collaboration of academics with the non-academic world) was targeted, delimited and described with new notions in a process of problematization. The notion of ‘impact’ together with the genre created for capturing it became the core of an administrative machinery—the impact infrastructure. This was a new reality that academics had to quickly come to terms with, positioning themselves towards it in a process of subjectification.

The run-up to REF2014 was a crucial and defining phase, but it was only the first stage of a longer process—the emergence of the concept of ‘impact’, the establishment of basic rules which would govern its generation, documentation, evaluation. Let’s recall Foucault’s argument that “rules are empty in themselves, violent and unfinalized; they are impersonal and can be bent to any purpose. The successes of history belong to those who are capable of seizing these rules”… (pp. 85–86). The rules embodied in the REF guidelines, the new genre of CS, the principals of ‘impact speak’ were in the first instance still “empty and unfinalized”. It was up to those subject to the rules to fill them with meaning.

The data analyzed in this study shows that despite dealing with a new powerful problematization and functioning in the framework of a complex infrastructure, academics continue to be active and highly reflective subjects, who discursively negotiate key concepts of the impact infrastructure and their own position within it. It will be fascinating to study the emergence of analogous evaluation systems in other countries and institutions. ‘Impact infrastructure’ and ‘genre’ are two excellent starting points for an analysis of ensuing changes to academic realities and subjectivities.

Data availability

The interview data analyzed in this paper is not publicly available, due to the confidential nature of the interview data. It can be made available by the corresponding author in anonymised form on reasonable request. The cited case studies were sourced from the REF database ( https://www.ref.ac.uk/2014/ ) and may be consulted online. The coded dataset is considered part of the analysis (and hence protected by copyright), but may be made available on reasonable request.

Most of the studied documents—71 CSs—have been submitted to the Unit of Assessment (UoA) 28—Linguistics and Modern Languages, the remaining seven have been submitted to five different UoAs but fall under the field of linguistics.

Some interviewees were involved in REF in more than just one role. ‘Authors’ of CSs authored the documents to a different degree, some (no = 5) were also engaged in the evaluation process in managerial roles.

Words underlined in interview excerpts were stressed by the speaker.

When citing interview data I give numbers attributed to individual interviews in the corpus, type of interviewee, and number of cited example.

‘Apparatus’ is one of the existing translations of the French ‘dispositif’, another one is ‘historical construct’ (Sembou, 2015 , p. 38) or ‘grid of intelligibility’ (Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1983 , p. 121). The French original is also sometimes used in English texts. In this paper, I use ‘apparatus’ and ‘infrastructure’, as the notion of ‘infrastructure’ has already become current in referring to resources dedicated to impact generation at universities, both in scholarly literature (Power, 2015 ) and in managerial ‘impact speak’.

A full version of the analysis may be found in Wróblewska, 2018 .

CS numbers are those found in the REF impact case study base: https://impact.ref.ac.uk/casestudies/ . I only provide CS numbers for cited fragments of one sentence or longer; exact sources for cited phrases may be given on request or easily identified in the CS database.

The figures given for appearances of certain elements of the genre in the studied corpus are drawn from the computer-assisted qualitative analysis conducted with MaxQDA software. They serve as an illustration of the relative frequency of particular elements for the reader, but since they are not the result of a rigorous corpus analytical study of a larger body of CSs, the researcher does can not claim statistical relevance.

Words underlined in CS excerpts are emphasized by the author of the analysis.

Number of occurrences of string ‘the first’ in the context of quality of research, excluding phrases like “the first workshop took place…” etc.

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Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Prof. Johannes Angermuller, the supervisor of the doctoral dissertation in which many of the ideas discussed in this paper were first presented. Prof. Angermuller’s guidance and support were essential for the development of my understanding of the importance of discourse in evaluative contexts. I also thank the reviewers of the aforementioned thesis, Prof. Jo Angouri and Prof. Srikant Sarangi for their feedback which helped me develop and clarify the concepts which I use in my analysis, as well as its presentation. Any errors or omissions are of course my own. The research presented in this paper received funding from the European Research Council (DISCONEX project 313,172). The underpinning research was also facilitated by the author’s membership in EU Cost Action “European Network for Research Evaluation in the Social Sciences and the Humanities”(ENRESSH CA15137-E). Particularly advice and encouragement recieved from the late prof. Paul Benneworth was invaluable.

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Wróblewska, M.N. Research impact evaluation and academic discourse. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 8 , 58 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-021-00727-8

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What Is a Discourse Analysis Essay: Example & Guide

Discourse is the way people talk about any specific topic. It’s also the way in which language is used to convey social and historical meanings. Discourse analysis is the process that helps to understand the underlying message of what is being said. Sounds interesting? Keep reading to learn more. 

Our specialists will write a custom essay specially for you!

This in this article, our custom writing team will:

• define discourse and its analysis; 
• explain how to write a discourse analysis essay step by step; 
• provide an essay sample.
• 🤔 Discourse Analysis Definition
• 🔬 Types & Approaches
• 👣 Step-by-Step Guide
• 📑 Discourse Analysis Example

🔍 References

🤔 what is a discourse analysis.

To write a good discourse analysis, it’s essential to understand its key concepts. This section of the article will focus on the definition of discourse itself and then move on to its analysis.

Discourse: Definition

Discourse is verbal or written communication that has unity, meaning, and purpose. In linguistics, discourse refers to a unit of language that is longer than a sentence. When you analyze discourse, you examine how the language is used to construct connected and meaningful texts. 

One crucial thing that can’t be neglected when it comes to discourse is the context. In linguistics, there are different ways to classify contexts. Here is one such classification:

The knowledge of context is crucial for discourse analysis, as it helps interpret the text’s meaning. For that reason, it’s essential to keep the context in mind while analyzing the discourse. No context simply means no discourse.  

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Discourse vs Syntax: Difference

• Syntax is one of discourse’s dimensions. It encompasses rules for composing grammatical sentences. Unlike discourse, syntax can also be applied to non-verbal instances such as music or any other code.
• Discourse is one level above syntax. It studies how the sets of sentences following syntactic parameters work together and convey the meaning.

Spoken Discourse vs Written Discourse

Discourse itself can be classified as written and spoken (or oral.) One of the main differences is that spoken discourse uses spoken words to transfer information, while written one uses written words. There are also some other differences:

• Spoken discourse needs to be understood immediately. It also usually contains discourse markers— words that create pause or separation of ideas such as “you know,” “like,” or “well.” 
• Written discourse can be referred to several times. For the written discourse to happen, the participants need to know how to write and read, requiring specific skills. It’s also often tied to the genre or structure of the language it uses to imply the purpose or context of the text. 

Discourse Analysis Definition

Discourse analysis is a technique that arose in the late 20th century from the growing interest in qualitative research. The main purpose of discourse analysis is to understand the message and its implications. It can be done by studying the text’s parts and the factors that influence people’s understanding of it.

Discourse analysis is deeply connected with linguistics, anthropology, sociology, socio-psychology, philosophy, communications studies, and literature. It challenges the idea that we should take language for granted and instead encourages more interpretative and qualitative approaches. That’s why it is used in various fields to:

• describe organizational change;
• read between the lines while analyzing policy texts;
• provide greater depth to qualitative accounting research;
• use multiple fields to synthesize information. 

Content Analysis vs. Discourse Analysis

Content analysis and discourse analysis are research techniques used in various disciplines. However, there are several differences between the two:

• Content analysis is quantitative. It focuses on studying and retrieving meaningful information from documents.
• Discourse analysis is qualitative. It focuses on how language is used in texts and contexts.

🔬 Preparing to Write a Discourse Analysis Essay

Now let’s talk about writing a discourse analysis essay. Before you start to work on your paper, it’s best to decide what type of discourse analysis you plan to do and choose the correct approach. It will influence your topic choice and writing techniques. Besides, it will make the whole process easier.

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Types of Discourse Analysis: How to Choose

Critical Discourse Analysis Characteristics

Critical discourse analysis or CDA is a cross-disciplinary methodological and theoretical approach. It focuses on the issues of power and inequalities in linguistic interactions between individuals and groups. It’s closely related to applied linguistics, cultural and social studies, anthropology, intercultural communication, and critical pedagogy.

Choose a critical discourse analysis if you want to do the following:

• Study meaning and context of the verbal interaction or a text.
• Focus on the topics of identity and power.
• Examine the potential for a change in an area.
• Explore the connections between power and ideology.

Cultural Discourse Analysis Characteristics

Cultural discourse analysis or CuDA is a method of studying culturally distinctive communication practices in our world. In the communication field, CuDA is most often used by scholars of Language and Social Interaction.

Choose a cultural discourse analysis if you’re interested in:

• Studying culturally-specific means of communication in various local contexts.
• Seeing how people talk about identity, relations, actions, and feelings.
• Proving that the differences should be acknowledged, embraced, and celebrated in intercultural dialogue.

Political Discourse Analysis Characteristics

Political discourse analysis or PDA focuses on the use of language in politics, political texts, and documents. It also includes the recipients of communicative political events, such as the citizens and the general public. Therefore, it can be said the discourse is located in both political and public spheres.

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Choose a political discourse analysis if you want to do the following:

• Deal with the concepts of political power, power   abuse ,  or domination.
• Examine the discursive conditions and consequences of social and political inequality.
• Analyze the words and actions of politicians.

Multimodal Discourse Analysis Characteristics

Multimodal discourse analysis is a technique that implies looking at multiple modes of communication such as text, color, and images. It studies how they interact with one another to create semiotic meaning.

Each mode of communication plays a specific role in the analysis. A picture, for instance, can easily depict something that takes too long to describe in words. Colors are mainly used to highlight specific aspects of the general message.

Choose a multimodal discourse analysis if you plan to:

• Look at several modes of communication at once.
• Conduct a nuanced and complex analysis of visual media.
• Work with online sources and platforms. 

Approaches to Discourse Analysis: How to Choose

Now that you’ve chosen the type of discourse analysis, it’s time to choose a suitable approach. There are two approaches to discourse analysis: language -in-use and socio-political discourse analysis .

• The language-in-use approach mainly focuses on the regular use of language in communication. It pays attention to sentence structure, phonology, and grammar. This approach is very descriptive and is mainly used in linguistics or literature.
• The socio-political approach focuses on how a language influences the social and political context and vice versa. One of the main socio-political approaches is Critical Discourse Analysis, born out of Michel Foucault’s work Discipline and Punish . It identifies two types of power: normalized and repressive (you can read about in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on Foucault .) 

The language-in-use framework involves identifying the technicalities of language and investigating how the features are used in a particular social context. 

the English language usually uses affixes and suffixes but not infixes. If an English speaker says something similar to “that’s un-flipping-believable,” the questions for this approach would be “What role does the infix play?” or “What is the goal of using such an infix?” 

Now let’s see an example of a socio-political approach. We’ll take the power dynamic between a teacher and a student as an illustration.

A teacher threatening a student with detention if they don’t stop speaking in class can be classified as a repressive power. Normalized power, in contrast, isn’t actively asserted. It’s the power that makes students not want to talk in class. It’s manifested in the subtle clues from our environment that tell students how to behave.

👣 How to Do Discourse Analysis Step by Step

Now you are finally ready to start writing your discourse analysis. Follow our step-by-step guide, and you’ll excel at it.

Step #1: Choose the research question and select the content of the analysis.

Coming up with a clearly defined research question is crucial. There’s no universal set of criteria for a good research question. However, try to make sure that you research question:

• clearly states the purpose of the work;
• is not too broad or too narrow;
• can be investigated and has enough sources to rely on;
• allows you to conduct an analysis;
• is not too difficult to answer.

Step #2: Gather information.

Go through interviews, speeches, discussions, blogs, etc., to collect all the necessary information. Make sure to gather factual details of when and where the content you will use was created, who the author is, and who published it.

Step #3: Study the context.

This step involves a close examination of various elements of the gathered material.

• Take a closer look at the words used in the source text, its sentences, paragraphs, and overall structure.
• Consider 3 constructs of context: participants, setting, and purpose . These 3 characteristics reflect information about the individual, their emotional state, and their identity as members of a societal group.

Step #4: Review the results.

Once you’ve researched and examined all the sources, it’s time to reflect on your results and place your analysis in a broader context.

• To establish a broader context, you may consider what events have impacted the topic you are writing about and the consequences.  
• Finally, draw conclusions that answer your research question. 

Step #5: Make an outline.

Before you are all set with your discourse analysis, one last step is to write an outline. Usually, a discourse analysis essay consists of six parts:

📑 Example of Discourse Analysis Essay

Now that you know all about discourse analysis, we will introduce an example of a discourse analysis essay. From this sample, you can see what the layout of this kind of essay usually looks like. 

You might also want to check out the discourse analysis samples below.

• Psychometric Approach and Discourse Analysis in Psychology of Laughter
• Financial Discourse Under Financial Crisis 2007-2008
• Dysphemism in Political Discourse Examples
• Historical Memory Discourse in Public Diplomacy
• Isolationism in Contemporary Public Discourse
• Lincoln’s and Dickinson’s Rhetorical Discourses

Discourse Analysis Essay Topics

• Terrorism theories and media discourse  
• The benefits of infographics in social media advertising 
• Do better communication skills lead to the development of the social self? 
• How can you make social media advertising successful? 
• Possible causes of the Mayan civilization’s political collapse    
• Commission of Education and Communication’s worldwide contribution  
• Coach and athletes’ communication strategy 
• Celebrities ‘ impact on politics 
• Social media marketing for brand promotion 
• What makes listening the most effective communication technique? 
• Excessive social media usage and its consequences 
• Web-based organizational discourses: climate change  
• Media as a tool to cause intense emotions 
• Verbal and nonverbal communication skills for presentations  
• New media technologies and the development of relationships and communication 
• Features and issues of the American political system  
• Association between social media use and FOMO 
• Communication issues between stakeholders 
• Why is political opportunity theory essential for social movement studies? 
• How do social media and the Internet connect people? 
• How can communication be used for self-presentation? 
• Does social media limit personal freedom? 
• Hamlet’s universality and contemporary cultural discourse  
• Is it possible to apply Goffman’s theory of the presentation of self in digital communication? 
• The Democratic and Republican Party’s position on the issue of Terrorism  
• How does social media affect families? 
• How communication affects the individual’s development  
• Characteristics of a political issue  
• Ageism in media and society 
• Possible mobile communication technologies of the future 
• How does social media technology improve democratic processes? 
• Persuasion and public communication  
• The signs of social media addiction  
• Psychometric approach and discourse analysis in the psychology of laughter  
• The role of media in a political system 
• Cultural differences in nonverbal communication  
• The politically socialized vision of the world 
• The negative effects of digital media platforms on the lives of young people 
• Core beliefs of different political ideologies  
• Approaches to overcome miscommunications in the workplace  
• The effectiveness of social media tools for educational purposes 
• Is technology a threat to face-to-face communication? 
• What issues come with using electronic media ? 
• Difficulties connected with the development of communication technologies  

Thanks for reading till the end! We hope you’ve enjoyed the article and found lots of helpful information. If you did, feel free to share it with your friends. We wish you good luck with the discourse analysis essay!

Further reading

• How to Write a Discursive Essay: Tips to Succeed & Examples
• Case Study Analysis: Examples + How-to Guide & Writing Tips
• How to Write a Literary Analysis Essay Step by Step
• How to Write a Rhetorical Analysis Essay: Outline, Steps, & Examples

❓ Discourse Analysis FAQs

Literary discourse analysis is a type of discourse analysis that deals with literature and is viewed as a relatively new approach to it. It integrates the analysis of literature and non-literary genres in an innovative study of discourse.

Rhetoric uses language to appeal to emotions to persuade, inform, or motivate the audience. Rhetorical discourse is used to study texts aimed at specific audiences. Such texts often try to convince or persuade people by using particular language and arguments. 

Critical discourse analysis focuses on issues of power and inequalities in linguistic interactions between individuals and different groups. It studies the role of power in the social construction of difference and examines how it’s created, questioned or inflicted through communication.

Discourse analysis is a blanket term that encompasses a range of qualitative research approaches that analyze the use of language in social contexts. These techniques help understand the underlying message of what people say and how they say it, whereas in face-to-face conversation, non-verbal interaction, documents, or images.

To write a discourse analysis of any community, you need to examine and understand it. Ask yourself these questions and try to identify the patterns:

1. What ideas or concerns keep the community together? 2. What kind of langue does it use? 3. Does it produce any written documents?

• Discourse: The University of Chicago
• Definition and Examples of Discourse: ThoughtCo
• Discourse: British Council: BBC
• Use Discourse Analysis: Emerald Publishing
• Discourse Analysis—What Speakers Do in Conversation: Linguistic Society of America
• Critical Discourse Analysis and Information and Communication Technology in Education: Oxford Research Encyclopedias
• Political Discourse Analysis: Exploring the Language of Politics and the Politics of Language: Research Gate
• Discourse Analysis and Everything You Need to Know: Voxco
• Multimodal Discourse Analysis: Diggit Magazine
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What Are the Different Types of Academic Discourse?

Academic discourse refers to the particular ways of thinking about and discussing information related to a specific area of academic study. Those involved in the discourse of a particular area of study are known as a " discourse community ." The academic discourse of a field of study comprises both informal and formal forms of communication.

A discourse community is comprised of people who share enough common knowledge and presuppositions to have a meaningful conversation about a given subject. For instance, someone who is part of the discourse community of linguistics will be familiar with basic linguistics jargon, the most common theories about linguistic development, and major movements related to linguistic thought. Members of the linguistics discourse community will also have similar understandings about the purpose and goals of language, which might be different than those shared by the English discourse community. The process of gaining the knowledge necessary to be part of a given academic discourse is known as discourse socialization. Discourse socialization ensures that people within a discipline do not have to state explicitly all of their assumptions about a subject or give extensive background information before beginning a conversation.

Informal academic discourse occurs through a variety of means. It may consist of conversations or emails between researchers in which they discuss current research or bounce ideas off of each other for future research. This sort of discourse often happens as a result of networking among students, professors and researchers connected with universities.

Formal academic discourse, on the other hand, is a more public form of communication. The most common type of formal discourse is through peer-reviewed journals and publications. Peer-reviewed publications are checked by editors and review committees who assess the credibility of submissions before they can become part of the discourse. These editors review and filter submissions based on what is most relevant or needed within their discipline.

Both formal and informal academic discourse can occur at academic conferences. Academicians are invited to present peer-reviewed papers at these conferences. Much informal networking and discussion also happens at conferences, providing cross-pollination of ideas between researchers within a given discipline.

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Discussion Comments

discographer March 25, 2014 @stonemason-- I think that many academicians don't find the time to participate in online discussions. I think that conferences are much better because it's a formal setting and invitations are sent personally. Moreover, many conferences also include workshops and participants are encouraged or even required to participate and share their opinions and research. So I think that conferences and other official meetings are a more productive type of discourse.

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• By: Focus Pocus LTD Academic discourse refers to the particular ways of thinking about and discussing information related to a specific area of academic study.
• By: nyul Formal academic discourse is a public form of communication.
• By: Monkey Business The most well-respected medical journals feature peer-reviewed research, which has been read and approved by other doctors.

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Resignation of NPR Editor Who Penned Critical Essay on Company Amid Suspension

Npr editor uri berliner resigns after criticising the organization for promoting liberal views. he accuses new ceo katherine maher of disparaging him. the suspension and resignation highlight tensions in news organizations over editorial freedom. maher, a former tech executive, faces criticism for past social media posts about trump. berliner supports npr's mission despite his resignation..

A National Public Radio editor who wrote an essay criticising his employer for promoting liberal views resigned on Wednesday, attacking NPR's new CEO on the way out.

Uri Berliner, a senior editor on NPR's business desk, posted his resignation letter on X, formerly Twitter, a day after it was revealed that he had been suspended for five days for violating company rules about outside work done without permission.

"I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged by a new CEO whose divisive views confirm the very problems" written about in his essay, Berliner said in his resignation letter.

Katherine Maher, a former tech executive appointed in January as NPR's chief executive, has been criticized by conservative activists for social media messages that disparaged former President Donald Trump. The messages predated her hiring at NPR.

NPR's public relations chief said the organisation does not comment on individual personnel matters. The suspension and subsequent resignation highlight the delicate balance that many U.S. news organisations and their editorial employees face. On one hand, as journalists striving to produce unbiased news, they're not supposed to comment on contentious public issues; on the other, many journalists consider it their duty to critique their own organisations' approaches to journalism when needed. In his essay, written for the online Free Press site, Berliner said NPR is dominated by liberals and no longer has an open-minded spirit. He traced the change to coverage of Trump's presidency.

"There's an unspoken consensus about the stories we should pursue and how they should be framed," he wrote. "It's frictionless — one story after another about instances of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate apocalypse, Israel doing something bad and the dire threat of Republican policies. It's almost like an assembly line." He said he'd brought up his concerns internally and no changes had been made, making him "a visible wrong-thinker at a place I love." In the essay's wake, NPR top editorial executive, Edith Chapin, said leadership strongly disagreed with Berliner's assessment of the outlet's journalism and the way it went about its work.

It's not clear what Berliner was referring to when he talked about disparagement by Maher. In a lengthy memo to staff members last week, she wrote: "Asking a question about whether we're living up to our mission should always be fair game: after all, journalism is nothing if not hard questions. Questioning whether our people are serving their mission with integrity, based on little more than the recognition of their identity, is profoundly disrespectful, hurtful and demeaning." Conservative activist Christopher Rufo revealed some of Maher's past tweets after the essay was published. In one tweet, dated January 2018, Maher wrote that "Donald Trump is a racist." A post just before the 2020 election pictured her in a Biden campaign hat.

In response, an NPR spokeswoman said Maher, years before she joined the radio network, was exercising her right to express herself. She is not involved in editorial decisions at NPR, the network said.

The issue is an example of what can happen when business executives, instead of journalists, are appointed to roles overseeing news organisations: they find themselves scrutinised for signs of bias in ways they hadn't been before. Recently, NBC Universal News Group Chairman Cesar Conde has been criticised for service on paid corporate boards.

Maher is the former head of the Wikimedia Foundation. NPR's own story about the 40-year-old executive's appointment in January noted that she "has never worked directly in journalism or at a news organisation." In his resignation letter, Berliner said that he did not support any efforts to strip NPR of public funding. "I respect the integrity of my colleagues and wish for NPR to thrive and do important journalism," he wrote.

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Guest Essay

We Don’t See What Climate Change Is Doing to Us

By R. Jisung Park

Dr. Park is an environmental and labor economist and assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of “Slow Burn: The Hidden Costs of a Warming World.”

Many of us realize climate change is a threat to our well-being. But what we have not yet grasped is that the devastation wreaked by climate change comes not just from headline-grabbing catastrophes but also from the subtler accumulation of innumerable slow and unequal burns that are already underway — the nearly invisible costs that may not raise the same alarm but that, in their pervasiveness and inequality, may be much more harmful than commonly realized. Recognizing these hidden costs will be essential as we prepare ourselves for the warming that we have ahead of us.

Responsibility for mitigating climate change on the local level lies in part with public institutions not only in encouraging emissions reductions but also in facilitating adaptation. Public discourse around climate change too often misses the central role that local institutions play in this latter function, how much of the realized pain locally depends on not simply the physical phenomena of climate change per se but also how they interact with human systems — economic, educational, legal and political.

Let’s start with heat, which is killing more people than most other natural disasters combined. Research shows that record-breaking heat waves are only part of the story. Instead, it may be the far more numerous unremarkably hot days that cause the bulk of societal destruction, including through their complex and often unnoticed effects on human health and productivity. In the United States, even moderately elevated temperatures — days in the 80s or 90s Fahrenheit — are responsible for just as many excess deaths as the record triple-digit heat waves, if not more, according to my calculations based on a recent analysis of Medicare records.

In some highly exposed and physically demanding industries, like mining, a day in the 90s can increase injury risk by over 65 percent relative to a day in the 60s. While some of these incidents involve clear cases of heat illness, my colleagues and I have found that a vast majority appear to come from ostensibly unrelated accidents, like construction workers falling off ladders and manufacturing workers mishandling hazardous machinery. In California, our research shows, heat might have routinely caused 20,000 workplace injuries per year, only a tiny fraction of which were officially recorded as heat-related.

A growing body of literature links temperature to cognitive performance and decision making. Research shows that hotter days lead to more mistakes, including among professional athletes ; more local crime ; and more violence in prisons , according to working papers. They also correspond with more use of profanity on social media , suggesting that even an incrementally hotter world is likely to be a nontrivially more irritable, error-prone and conflictual one.

Children are not immune. In research using over four million student test scores from New York City, I found that, from 1999 to 2011, students who took their high school Regents exams on a 90-degree day were 10 percent less likely to pass their subjects relative to a day in the 60s. In other research, my colleagues Joshua Goodman, Michael Hurwitz and Jonathan Smith and I found that across the country, hotter school years led to slower gains on standardized exams like the Preliminary SAT exams. It may not seem a huge effect, on average: roughly 1 percent of learning lost per one-degree-hotter school year temperatures. Probably hardly noticeable in any given year. But because these learning effects are cumulative, they may have significant consequences.

And that’s just heat. Researchers are bringing to light the more subtle yet cumulatively damaging effects of increased wildfires and other natural disasters. The hidden consequences of wildfire smoke may cut even deeper than the more visible death and destruction caused by the flames. Tallying the downstream economic and health costs of smoke exposure, researchers have estimated in a not-yet-published paper that increased wildfire smoke due to climate change may cause more than 20,000 additional deaths per year nationwide by 2050. Very few of these will be officially categorized as having been caused by wildfires, because they will have been the result of the cumulative influence of worsened air quality and weakened health over the course of many weeks and months. Research now suggests that wildfire smoke can adversely affect fetal health , student learning and workers’ earnings as well.

Since even noncatastrophic climate change may be more subtly damaging and inequality amplifying than we used to think, local interventions are essential to help us prepare for the warming that is to come.

At present, our social and economic systems are not well prepared to adjust to the accumulating damage wreaked by climate change, even though much of what determines whether climate change hurts us depends on the choices we make as individuals and as a society. Whether a hot day leads to mild discomfort or widespread mortality comes down to human decisions — individual decisions such as whether to install and operate air-conditioning and collective decisions around the pricing and availability of insurance, the allocation of hospital beds or the procedures and norms governing how and when people work.

Recent research indicates that how temperature affects human health depends greatly on the adaptations that happen to be at play locally. For instance, a day above 85 degrees in the coldest U.S. ZIP codes has nearly 10 times the effect on elderly mortality relative to in the warmest ZIP codes. In other words, a string of such days in a place like Seattle will lead to a much higher increase in the mortality rate than in a place like Houston, even though both places have similar income levels. In rural India , institutional factors like access to banking may affect how many lives are ultimately lost because of heat; heat can reduce crop yields, leaving subsistence farmers dependent on financing sources to keep them afloat.

In our research of heat and learning , we found that the adverse effects of a one-degree-hotter school year are two to three times as large for Black and Hispanic students, who are less likely to have working air-conditioning at school or at home even within a given city, and are virtually nonexistent in schools and neighborhoods with high levels of home and school air-conditioning. We estimate that hotter temperatures may already be responsible for 5 percent of racial academic achievement gaps. Without remedial investments, climate change is likely to widen these gaps. With a shift in focus to these subtler social costs, we can devise and carry out more effective strategies. But right now, adaptation efforts remain highly fragmented and are often focused on more visibly salient climate hazards, like storm surges .

And, of course, an empirically nuanced understanding of climate damages makes it even clearer that reducing emissions aggressively makes cost-benefit sense not only because we want to insure against total ecological breakdown (cue “extinction rebellion” and “tipping points”) but also because the economic costs of even noncatastrophic warming may be considerable. Recent Environmental Protection Agency estimates that incorporate just some of these cumulative impacts suggest that a single ton of carbon dioxide sets in motion $190 worth of future social costs, which means that technologies that can reduce such emissions at a lower per-ton cost are most likely worth pursuing.

Climate change is a complex phenomenon whose ultimate costs will depend not only on how quickly we transition away from fossil fuels but also on how well we adapt our social and economic systems to the warming we have in store. A proactive stance toward adaptation and resilience may be useful from the standpoint of safeguarding one’s own physical and financial security, whether as a homeowner or the head of a Fortune 500 company. It may be vital for ensuring that the ladders of economic opportunity are not deteriorating for those attempting to climb its lower rungs.

R. Jisung Park is an environmental and labor economist and assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of “Slow Burn: The Hidden Costs of a Warming World.”

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She used Grammarly to proofread her paper. Now she's accused of 'unintentionally cheating.'

Whatever my school's rule is on artificial intelligence, i will abide by it. but the concern over grammarly makes me think of the debate over calculator use in schools from the 1970s..

Grammarly , the company that provides the eponymous grammar and syntax program, recently announced that it’s getting smarter and now offers “strategic suggestions” for its  30 million users . It might not be an innovation that helps the company.

As Grammarly gains more generative capabilities, its usefulness for students declines because it will place them at risk for unnecessary academic discipline. 

In a story that’s gone viral, University of North Georgia student Marley Stevens ended up on academic probation for using Grammarly on her criminal justice essay. Stevens said her professor accused her of “unintentionally cheating” on her academic work because she used the program to proofread her paper.

Stevens received a zero for the assignment, which she said put her scholarship at risk. Under Stevens’ TikTok video , comments indicated that she’s not the only student who’s been penalized for Grammarly use. 

Stevens’ case shows the murkier world of using artificial intelligence in schools – using it as an aid, a resource, rather than a replacement for one’s work. Until now, discussions of AI’s use in academics focused on its potential for plagiarism, the act of simply representing an AI product as one’s own work, which is admittedly indefensible.  Researchers from Stanford University say that concern is overblown. 

At my school, Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts, the use of generative AI is prohibited .

What's considered cheating may depend on your school

Grammarly hasn’t been necessarily generative in the ways we think of that type of intelligence; it couldn’t write a student’s essay like ChatGPT can. But now the “ strategic suggestions ” make the program more generative in nature – and more likely to fall under general AI bans. 

Here’s the rub, though: Many schools encourage and even pay for students to use Grammarly. It's expressly promoted in at least 3,000 educational institutions that have signed up for institutional accounts, according to Grammarly .

In Stevens’ case, the University of North Georgia promoted Grammarly on its website then removed it , then placed it on its website again. 

High school seniors need help: Why the college application process isn't adding up for students

While individual schools should be allowed to create their own policies, we are headed for a situation where what’s considered cheating is allowed at one school and not at another. Or in one course and not another.

That’s a problem because academic integrity is universal. Or at least it’s supposed to be. 

Whatever the rule is on using Grammarly, I will abide by it, but I notice that the concern over the type of assistance Grammarly provides hearkens back to the debate over calculator use in schools.

How is Grammarly different from a calculator – or autocorrect?

Back in the 1970s, some educators and parents worried that calculators might supplant math lessons . Research shows that they never did. It took 50 years, but with calculators now required in some courses and tests, we know that assistive technology doesn’t necessarily replace basic lessons – or do our work for us. 

We now prioritize agility of thought and creativity over memorization; that’s why some schools rid themselves of  spelling tests  in favor of critical thinking. 

Will my student loan be forgiven? Prepare for disappointment and hardship. Grace period for repayments expires in September.

If anything, these devices and programs allow deeper learning, mostly because they’re used by students who are well past the age of initial math functions and grammar lessons. If anything, Grammarly is a refresher on grammar lessons of years past. 

Technically, autocorrect is a form of AI , but holding its use against a student whose typos were fixed would be overkill and defeat the purpose of these programs, which were created to meet the needs of education’s evolution. 

Whether using Grammarly constitutes cheating is a multibillion dollar question that remains unanswered; it's an ethical question that intersects with school finance. Use of Grammarly might cause students to lose scholarships, and schools don’t refund tuition if a student is expelled and that student may owe student loans. On top of that are the opportunity costs of being accused of cheating.

Marley Stevens’ fight wages on, but Grammarly donated $4,000 to her GoFundMe to assist her education. 

Beyond Stevens’ case, though, technology companies that provide programs to students need to consider how making their products more generative will create more problems for students who use them. And teachers and schools that ban these programs need to consider what kind of learning they want from students.  

Ultimately – in all areas, not just education – AI is a case of making sure our technology does not outpace our integrity or call into question honest work. Otherwise, we all may be cheating. Or worse, not learning as much as we can.

William Tang is a high school junior at Deerfield Academy and serves on the school’s Honor Committee.

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Honoring Our 2023-24 Retiring Faculty Members

James Baillie, PhD - Tyson Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, College of Arts & Sciences

When Jim Baillie began attending university, he didn’t know what philosophy was. As A first-generation student at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, he initially intended to major in Literature. As part of his degree, however, he was required to take a philosophy course, where he had a feeling of ‘recognition’ he had not experienced before. “I remember thinking ‘This is what I do.’”

Lori Chorpenning MS, RN, CMSRN, CNE - Instructor, School of Nursing & Health Innovations

Lori Chorpenning, in her own words, has had “a finger in every pot” when it comes to UP’s School of Nursing & Health Innovations (SONHI). A nurse for 43 years and a member of the UP nursing faculty since 2003, she was instrumental in the formation of UP’s groundbreaking Dedicated Education Unit (DEU) clinical education model. “When I was in nursing school and you went to hospitals, you weren’t allowed to even ask the nurses there a question,” she remembers. “We wanted something better for our students.”

Karen Eifler, PhD - Director, Garaventa Center - Professor, School of Education

The title of Karen Eifler’s most recent essay collection, Near Occasions of Hope: A Woman’s Glimpse of a Church That Can Be, could also serve as a worthy title for her career in Catholic education. A beloved professor in UP’s School of Education for 26 years and director of the Garaventa Center for Catholic Intellectual Life since 2013, she firmly believes in the role a Catholic education can play in society, in a university community, in a life, and she committed her career to the formation of teachers in this context. “I love the idea of teaching as a vocation,” she says, “as a way to wholeness and purpose and grace.”

Rebecca Gaudino, PhD, M Div - Senior Lecturer, Theology College of Arts & Sciences

Rebecca Gaudino has always been interested in questions of faith and meaning. As a girl, she and her family led to America from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where her mother worked as a nurse and her father as a teacher. “The town where we lived was destroyed during the Mulele rebellion,” she remembers. “We petitioned to come to the U.S., and we started all over again from nothing.” As she grew up, she was forbidden to speak about the experience. “It was not until I was in my late twenties that I started speaking about it and started to realize what it means to be ripped away from everyone you know,” she says. “I think that set me to studying literature and stories of people’s lives, and that drew me to theology as well.”

Sally J. Hood, PhD - Associate Professor School of Education

Before Sally Hood was a professor of education, she got her start in the classroom as a high school French teacher in Salem, Indiana. After eight years of teaching, she enrolled at Indiana University, Bloomington, to pursue graduate work. After teaching upper-level courses with the Chair of the Language Education department, she decided to pursue a doctoral degree. “My teaching in higher education has a strong practical orientation, because of my high school experience,” she says. “And my research has always been rooted in our K-12 schools and teachers’ classrooms with a particular focus on teachers’ professional development.”

Bohn Lattin, PhD - Professor of Communication College of Arts & Sciences

What’s a rite of passage almost every high schooler dreads? Speech class. But if you ask Bohn Lattin, that’s just because they haven’t had enough practice. If Bohn had his way, public speaking would be woven into the school curriculum starting in kindergarten. With that kind of preparation, he says, this country’s citizenry might be able to engage in civil discourse with, you know, civility. Though he hasn’t convinced the public school board to change its curriculum—yet! (more on that later)—the communication professor has made a huge impact on students over his 32-year tenure on The Bluff.

Ellen Lippman, PhD - John Becic Distinguished Professor in Accounting, Pamplin School of Business

Before she was a certified public accountant, Ellen Lippman was a dancer. Her interest in the pivoting towards the “language of business” was both practical and passion-based: “Most professional dancers have a limited period to be active,” she says. “Accounting is a career that people can do for their lifetime, anywhere in the world. Plus, it’s really fun and interesting!” She first came to UP as an auditor in 1983. “I had always harbored thoughts of working as a professor,” she says.

Kay F. Molkentin, PhD - Professor of Practice of Entrepreneurship, Pamplin School of Business

For Kay Molkentin, the study of entrepreneurship is a perfect combination of all three of her passions – science, business, and creativity. As a professor and director of Entrepreneurship at UP since 2019, she has worked extensively to challenge the next generation of business innovators through her work in the Entrepreneurship Scholars program and the annual Pilot Venture Challenge.“When I saw the Entrepreneurship Professor of Practice position at UP, I knew it was written for me,” she says.

Debra L. Stephens, PhD, MA - Associate Professor of Marketing, Pamplin School of Business

For Debra Stephens, the study of Marketing is really the study of human behavior. “Humans are fascinating, and there’s nothing more fascinating than what causes people to do what they do,” she says. “The field of consumer behavior encompasses everything from your morning routine, what house you buy, pet ownership. It really gives you a comprehensive picture of a person.” In her time as a Marketing professor over the last 22 years at UP, she has been hard at work passing on her enthusiasm for consumer behavior and marketing to the next generation.

Edward J. Valente, PhD - Professor of Chemistry, College of Arts & Sciences

Ed Valente has always been interested in molecular structure and in particular X-ray diffraction. But it is not only the science of chemistry that excites him, it is the fact that chemistry is the foundation for all material sciences, from biology and biochemistry to engineering and medicine. “Chemistry is known as the ‘central science,’” he says. “I wanted my students to understand and use the language of chemistry as well as learn its principles and applications.” Over the course of his career, he has greatly enjoyed helping students discover their powers of logic and deductive reasoning and plans to continue supporting undergraduate research as an emeritus faculty member in the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry.

Jacqueline Waggoner, EdD - Professor, School of Education

In 2016, Jackie Waggoner earned the title of Professor of Education at University of Portland, fulfilling a lifelong dream that first took root when she was a young child holding classes for her dolls. Those early lessons in the three Rs were a far cry from the graduate-level classes in quantitative and qualitative research and statistics, tests and measurement, assessment, and data-driven decision-making she’s been known for since arriving on The Bluff as an adjunct professor in 2003. “I believe that data can and should be used to further social justice and improve people’s lives,” she says.

Valerie Walters, PhD, MS - Senior Instructor, Chemistry College of Arts & Sciences

Valerie Walters fell in love with chemistry in college. Originally a biology major at Kalamazoo College in Michigan, she took a Physical Chemistry class and decided to switch gears, eventually going on to receive her PhD in Physical Chemistry from Yale University. It is her research experiences with UP students that stand out to her as her proudest achievements at UP. “I like to think that those experiences will help them in their careers,” she says. She’s also not done with chemistry — she will be a UP Visiting Scholar for two years after retirement, finishing up past research and starting new research with her husband at Lewis & Clark.

Bruce Weitzel, PhD - Associate Dean and Professor, School of Education

Bruce Weitzel began his career in education with the help of his own teachers. “Educators are always the product of other educators,” he says, “Especially those who have modeled their passion for learning and listening. The educators who drew me into schools and the classroom were dedicated to engaging with ideas and with people.” His passion for learning and teaching has led him during his time in the education field. As such, he has left a lasting mark on local schools, both at the K-12 and collegiate levels.

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