Genre Uptake as Boundary-Work: Reasoning About Uptake in Wikipedia Articles

Abstract

The circulation of scientific and technical genres in online publics can shape both public opinion and policy deliberation about issues such as global warming. While rhetoric and professional writing scholarship has documented the myriad ways that genres are transformed as they circulate across discursive boundaries, few examine how argument shapes those transformation and circulations. Drawing on Gieryn’s concept of boundary-work, this article analyzes arguments in the discussion pages of Wikipedia articles about global warming to document how editors argue about genre as they deliberate over what counts as reliable sources of global warming knowledge. This analysis demonstrates how argument mediates genre uptake and circulation. In doing so, it helps account for how technical and scientific genres circulate in contemporary online publics.

Embedded Genres

“…However, the intricacies involved in the embedding of genres inside genres reach far beyond the scope of the present article. Thus, further research is needed not only in the concepts related to embedded genres, but also in the role embedded genres play in hyper-complex genres, in the genres of institutions, in public genres (Mehlenbacher & Miller, 2017;Reiff & Bawarshi, 2016;Cooke, 2021), and in individual exchanges (Freadman 1994(Freadman , 2002. Related to the last point we need a better understanding of the roles and actions of the agents (Freadman, 2020) involved.…”

The Discursive Boundary Work of Recontextualizing Science for Policy: Opening the Black Box of an Organization’s Genre System and Intermediary Genre Sets

“…How actors access such genred knowledge is interpreted differently. Some use the notion of "intermediary genres" (Tachino, 2012) to explore the transitional texts that facilitate the "uptake" of knowledge from another genre (Bray, 2019;Cooke, 2021). Uptake here refers to one text anticipating a response in a separate text (Freadman, 2002).…”

“…Writing researchers have mapped the theoretical interconnections between boundary work and genre theory via uptake between scientific and nonscientific genres (Cooke, 2021). This mapping has explored several aspects of the science-policy interface, including the ways that federal policy anticipates the need for recontextualized science in the context of the American Environmental Impact Assessment (Bazerman et al, 2003), how representations of recontextualized scientific data are rhetorically used in science advisory reports (Falconer, 2023), and how "expert opinion reports"-a term that echoes the type of advisory reports produced by the CCA-produced by the European health agency communicate scientific knowledge to nonexpert audiences through X (formerly Twitter) (Orpin, 2019).…”

Prolepsis and Rendering Futures in Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Reports

“…Significantly, the ways in which genres are, or are not, taken up allows us to see how genres “coordinate complex forms of social action” and, significantly, “how and why genres get taken up in certain ways and not others, what gets done and not done as a result” ( Bawarshi & Reiff, 2010 , p. 86). Uptake, in other words, is a way in which earlier genres are recognized by later responses in the communicative chain that “confirms the status [of a preceding genre] by taking the information therein as worthy of repeating or re-representing” ( Cooke, 2021 , p. 178). In the case of climate change, the IPCC report, which is taken up by a variety of stakeholders (e.g., media, policymakers, activists), each uptake has the potential to trigger an evolutionary response in the genre.…”