This collaborative autoethnography explores how a doctoral peer writing group (PWG) has become an important means of fostering well-being among the authors, who are four doctoral scholars. Focusing on how writing in doctoral education can act as a barrier to well-being, defined as feeling part of a community, feeling balanced, and feeling motivated by forward momentum, each author shares her particular experiences with writing and how the PWG has contributed to her well-being. Based on the authors' narratives, the article also suggests how PWGs may be useful in promoting well-being across several levels of education.
This qualitative study explores the nature and functions of the lab book genre in the discipline of medical physics. Specifically, it investigates how the multimodal nature of the lab book facilitates knowledge-making and identity construction in an academic medical physics community located in a Canadian university. The study employs the theoretical framework of Writing, Activity, and Genre Research (WAGR) in combination with the theoretical notions of communities of practice (CoP) and multimodality. The data collected include observational field notes, multimodal lab books collected from, and semi-structured interviews conducted with, five participants with a range of experience in the academic medical physics community. Findings of the study indicate that the lab book, particularly its multimodal features, serves as an important knowledgemaking artefact within the medical physics community. The genre is found to perform multiple roles, including, but not limited to, providing a means of reifying experimental results and a space for community members to participate and negotiate their professional identities within the discipline of medical physics. Implications for further research of the nature of knowledge in medical physics, as well as implications for multimodal genre analysis, are discussed.
It has been a privilege to work on this edited collection despite the fact that much of the work has taken place during a pandemic when, for many of us, our lives have been turned inside out. The series editors Terry Zawacki, Joan Mullin, Magnus Gustafsson, and Federico Navarro have been exceptionally helpful, as has been founding editor and publisher Mike Palmquist. Terry, in particular, has guided us with gentle encouragement and thoughtful suggestions throughout the process. We also thank the contributors for their work on chapters and for their collegial approach to this project. It has been a pleasure to work with you all, and we look forward to many years of collaborations in the future. We would also like to thank all the readers who read earlier drafts of pieces of this collection. We are grateful for your careful work.Cecile: I would like to acknowledge the support from Memorial University for assistance in the preparation of this manuscript and in particular for the Publications Subventions Program grant. I also want to thank my co-editors, Britt and Jamie, for a most enjoyable journey. Our virtual meetings became a highlight for me. I'm also extremely grateful to both of them for carrying the load when I became ill. They conveyed their compassion and care in multiple ways.Britt: As I type this on my phone (with one hand, while feeding my new baby), I am astounded at what can be accomplished when academics come together to care-fully collaborate. As authors and editors, we have been through births, deaths, sickness (hello Covid-19!), health, layoffs, new jobs, as well as dissertation endings (congrats!), beginnings, and somewhere in between. I am grateful to my co-editors who have sustained me in more ways than I could possibly detail. I am grateful to the authors, who gracefully took on rounds of editing and review in order to push this piece further. I am grateful to the Algonquin Nation whose territory includes the Ottawa River watershed, which nurtures and sustains my life and the lives of my kin. Finally, I am grateful to my human, Sean Botti, whose countless hours of visible and invisible labour has contributed to making this project a reality.Jamie: I am grateful to so many people who have been a part of bringing this collection together. I would like to thank my co-editors, Britt and Cecile, for their rigour, generosity, and care. The fact that we have edited this book from different corners of the world has frequently opened up interesting juxtapositions in time and season and in terms of how we think about doctoral education and writing. I am grateful to chapter authors for working with us RE-IMAGINING DOCTORAL WRITING
Writing and genre scholarship has become increasingly attuned to how various nontextual features of written genres contribute to the kinds of social actions that the genres perform and to the activities that they mediate. Even though scholars have proposed different ways to account for nontextual features of genres, such attempts often remain undertheorized. By bringing together Writing, Activity, and Genre Research, and Multimodal Interaction Analysis, the authors propose a conceptual framework for multimodal activity-based analysis of genres, or Multimodal Writing, Activity, and Genre (MWAG) analysis. Furthermore, by drawing on previous studies of the laboratory notebook (lab book) genre, the article discusses the rhetorical action the genre performs and its role in mediating knowledge construction activities in science. The authors provide an illustrative example of the MWAG analysis of an emergent scientist’s lab book and discuss its contributions to his increasing participation in medical physics. The study contributes to the development of a theoretically informed analytical framework for integrative multimodal and rhetorical genre analysis, while illustrating how the proposed framework can lead to the insights into the sociorhetorical roles multimodal genres play in mediating such activities as knowledge construction and disciplinary enculturation.
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